Useful one-line scripts for sed

(thanks to Gabe Weatherhead for the link)

My own preference differs from Mark Anderson's , though he is not wrong.

His sense is, I think, that a complex runCommand is saying,"make me a code note".

What I hear the same complex expressing saying, though, is "male me a script."  Take your complex runCommand, test it in Terminal, and store it in a file in some convenient place.  perl and ruby were (literally) made for this.  

They're alternatives and I think the pros/cons rather depend on your expertise and style of TB use.

runCommand()/$AutoFetchCommand/$HTMLEXportCommand.

• Pro. No setup needed just add the CL string and use.
• Con. Can be hard to use with other than simple CLs especially if needing to use lots of quotes.

Using a shell script:

• Pro. Work as any other shell script and can be stored in the same palace.
• Pro. Easy re-use by multiple TBXs.
• Pro. In latter case, one edit (to script) affects/corrects for all users.
• Pro. No problems dealing with single vs double quotes - just pass data to script as input parameters (assuming you know how!).
• Con. Assumes user understands Unix permissions, environment variables, where to store the script

Using a code note:

• Pro. Portable, will work from any Mac as script is stored in the TBX.
• Pro. No external set-up problems (e.g. how to call script), so good for CL neophytes.
• Pro. Once set up and tested can be replicated to other TBXs via drag drop.
• Pro/Con. Easy to set up a command line without having to worry about quoting within an actual runCommand() action - instead the evaluation of the code note becomes the runCommand() string. The downside is it's not suitable for writing complex shell functions/scripts.
• Con. Some internal set-up required (prototypes, etc.) though this isn't totally required and only needed once per TBX.
• Con. The most complicated tasks may need an external script to avoid any TB parsing issues.

There's absolutely no right/wrong here, use whatever suits you, but it is certainly true that for anything other than very simple CL tasks either of the latter options is a good idea. A techie person well versed in Unix, and CL will likely go the script route. Someone helping other users, especially non-tech types and where files need to be configured for others to use, will likely tend to code notes. Use whatever suits your needs. The main thing is to understand that if runCommand() doesn't suffice, there are more powerful options to tap into the shell - even if only to access UI-based tools like AppleScript or Automator.

Edited:

Thanks, Mark A. "Interacting with the Mac shell" is indeed a much better description for the replies in this thread.  However, the cutoff to this broader topic begins at Reply #1, no? Yet the only replies you have banished as "off topic" (mine) were in direct response to #1, #2, and #4 above.  I believe these and mine belong together under the same rubric, whatever and wherever that may be.  Why resemble the territory behind the GFC (Great Firewall of China) where posts that might "confuse" the people tend to get isolated and otherwise "harmonized" in various ways?

Back on the original narrow topic of this thread, sed...

This seems to be an amazingly concise and efficient way to do lots of things, though the "picket fence" of slashes and backslashes certainly intimidates. One sed tip I've come across that has helped me (a little) is here. The separators don't have to be slashes; they can be any (ascii, I presume) character one wants to use.

Another thing I've discovered is that if one needs to use sed in AppleScript to output text from DEVONthink or elsewhere that Tinderbox can import without complaint (e.g. change straight quotes to curlies) and one has the sed working on the command line or via the two-argument form of runCommand() in Tinderbox, one can get the quoted form of the sed command that AppleScript will accept by saving the sed command in a script file and then reading into AppleScript from the file. For example, for Mark A's quotify:

sed 's:"\([^"]*\)":“\1”:g' | sed "s:'\([d|ll|re|s|t|ve]\):’\1:g" | sed "s:'\([^']*\)':‘\1’:g"

When I put it in a file called quotify.txt on my desktop I can get the AppleScript-friendly form as follows in AppleScript Editor, ready for copying and pasting into an AppleScript do shell script():

Quote:

See this post.  Lest it be marginalized as overkill or something that might confuse later readers, let me say that the script there is nothing fancy, just something eminently practical for bringing linked DEVONthink material into Tinderbox without a lot of fiddling, and is based directly on your valuable contributions.

Note that the script there does in fact "run the sed in shell script and simply pass it the string to be cleaned as a script parameter."

Because it's AppleScript, and as far as I can tell there is no equivalent of the two-argument form of runCommand(), the script there uses the AppleScript-friendly form of your quotify sed. Try putting your quotify sed directly in an AppleScript (surrounded by quotes, of course) and I think you'll find that, as on my machine, it throws off an error because it needs to be escaped. I got miserably lost in the sed picket fence trying to add backslashes in the appropriate places.

Then I stumbled on an easy, practical solution. I put your quotify, which I knew worked in Tinderbox's two-argument form of runCommand(), in a text file and read the file into AppleScript as described in reply #6 above (at least it's "above" as I write this ).  I noticed an escaped form of quotify in the AppleScript editor result panel and pasted that into the appropriate place in the DEVONthink script to be fed into the do shell script statement.  AppleScript Editor accepted it!  I could then discard the unneeded external text file. Problem solved for me.

... Of course those with true prowess with sed may enjoy going in manually and spending time mucking around. But that's not for me, and in case there are other general users like me who are learning a little AppleScript to do useful things and occasionally need a do shell script there to get stuff into Tinderbox, I thought I'd share a practical tip.

BTW, I found quite a bit on the net about converting curlies to straight quotes, but your quotify is the only reliable method I've found for going the other way. The AppleScript-friendly version of it has been helpful in solving perplexing problems that I was having when putting tab-separated-data tables on the clipboard for pasting into Tinderbox, which I've found a supremely efficient way for getting data into Tinderbox since it creates new notes automatically, complete with the appropriate attributes, etc.  Thanks.