AppleScript stringWithFormat

Published by

Adam Tow

October 12, 2006

The task today for Annoture is localization. I’ve been looking far and wide across the Internet for an AppleScript equivalent to Cocoa’s stringWithFormat method to no avail. The lack of such a native function makes localizing an AppleScript Studio application difficult, as you can’t easily create formatted localized strings such as:

“%d image annotations were copied from %s to %s”

The alternative of creating several strings that I would have to concatenate was not very palatable, so I ended up writing a simple function that uses AppleScript’s do shell script command to call printf.


on localized_formatted_string(key_string, parameters)
	set cmd to "printf " & quoted form ofÂ¬
		(localized string key_string from table "Localizable")

	repeat with i from 1 to count parameters
		set cmd to cmd & space &Â¬
			quoted form of ((item i of parameters) as string)
	end repeat

	return do shell script cmd
end localized_formatted_string

If you’re not doing localization but want printf functionality in AppleScript, take out the line localized string key_string from table "Localizable" and replace with simply key_string. Parameters is simply a list of parameters to the printf command.

Now we’ll see how long it takes Google to index this post so people in the future don’t have to struggle as much as I did!

3 responses to “AppleScript stringWithFormat”

John Faughnan

October 13, 2006

Adam,

Not related directly to this post, but as someone who’s plumbed the depths of Aperture’s AppleScript you might know this answer.

There’s no way in Aperture to change the image date value Aperture stores in its database. We know it doesn’t have to be the same as the embedded image metadata value because if you import from iPhoto Aperture stores iPhoto’s user defined date value.

Is there a Scriptable API for changing the value of the Aperture database date value?

Reply
Adam Tow

October 13, 2006

John:

In the table zrkversion, there are numerous timestamp fields. The one you’re looking for is ZIMAGEDATE. The value looks to be in NSDate format. You can use the following AppleScript to convert it into an AppleScript date object:

set theDate to call method "dateWithTimeIntervalSinceReferenceDate:" of class "NSDate" with parameter (theTimestamp as real)

There’s no AppleScript API in Aperture’s dictionary to access this data, so you’ll need to go directly into the SQLite3 database of Aperture. Perhaps I’ll write an application that helps people edit the image date. Email me if you have any suggestions (I’ll poke over the Apple Discussion Forums for more details as well as posting a dedicated blog entry about this).

Reply
Evan

October 10, 2012

thanks for the code. I just needed to do some fancy printf formatting so I didn’t need the localization stuff. Can’t hurt to give the simplified code directly (though I really just followed your suggestion):

on formatted_string(key_string, parameters) set cmd to "printf " & quoted form of key_string
repeat with i from 1 to count parameters set cmd to cmd & space & quoted form of ((item i of parameters) as string) end repeat return do shell script cmd end formatted_string

Reply

Adam, here

Welcome to tow.com, my home on the internet since 1995. I’m an indie software artist and creator of apps such as MixEffect, MsgFiler, AlbumFiler, Wipe My Screen, and more. I’m also the producer and co-director of Autumn Gem. Enjoy your visit here!

tow.com