FastScripts 3.1 Adds AppleScript Commands for Regular Expressions

Speaking of automation, here’s an update near and dear to my regex-loving heart. Daniel Jalkut, writing at the Red Sweater blog:

This update introduces an expansion of FastScripts’s own built-in scripting additions, with three powerful new commands for searching, replacing, and splitting text with regular expressions.

These can be used by any AppleScript on your Mac, whether you’re running the script from FastScripts or not. These new commands are also completely free of charge, so if you install and keep FastScripts running in the background, your scripts will always have access to these features.

Like anything scripting-related, there are many ways to use regular expressions for searching and replacing text in AppleScript. Having a few good commands (searching, replacing, and splitting) built into a utility like FastScripts though, with a good scripting dictionary for the syntax, is really convenient. I started beta testing this version of FastScripts a few weeks ago, and I’ve already made a few new scripts that use it, and edited a few old scripts to use FastScripts’s regex commands to replace the now-unnecessary kludges workarounds I was using before. Very cool, too, for sharing scripts with others, that these regex commands are available in the free version of FastScripts.

★ Tuesday, 22 March 2022