Property Lists: Accessing Items In

Eggplant Functional
1

I’ve constructed a property list but am having trouble accessing items in the list.

I’ve simplified my code for testing purposes:

Global globalVariables
insert "val1:001" after globalVariables
insert "val2:002" after globalVariables
insert "val3:003" after globalVariables

put globalVariables

In debug mode the result of the “put”, which looks the way I’d expect it to, is:
(val1:001,val2:002,val3:003)

put the number of properties in globalVariables into myNum
log "Number of properties in globalVariables = " && myNum

In debug mode this returns zero.

put the item number of "val3" within globalVariables into myPos
log "Position of 'val3' within globalVariables = " && myPos

In debug mode this returns zero.

In my actual code I want to refer to these values like this:
globalVariables.val2
and in this case get back 002

Thoughts on what I’m doing wrong?

Thanks!

2

Hi Aaron,

Your code creates a list of strings, not a property list. You can easily check if something is a property list in debug mode like this:

put globalVariables is a property list #=> false in your case

What you want to do is something like this:

Global globalVariables 
put "001" into globalVariables.val1
put "002" into globalVariables.val2
put "003" into globalVariables.val3

This should get you what you need.

Happy New Year!

3

The piece I left out is that I’m trying to populate my list by parsing a text file. And right now the text file looks similar to how I want the list to look:

val1:001
val2:002
val3:003

So I was hoping to use the insert function so that I can iterate through my text file and just stuff the values into the list.

Can you recommend a best practice for doing something like that?

Thanks!

4

[quote=“AaronKuehn”]The piece I left out is that I’m trying to populate my list by parsing a text file. And right now the text file looks similar to how I want the list to look:

val1:001
val2:002
val3:003

So I was hoping to use the insert function so that I can iterate through my text file and just stuff the values into the list.

Can you recommend a best practice for doing something like that?

Thanks![/quote]

Ah yes. All you need to do then is something like this:

Repeat with each line of file "path/to/file.txt"
  insert value(it) after global globalVariables
end repeat

The value() function will convert this from a string to a property list.

Hope this helps.

Allen

5

I think I’m with you, but I’m still having a problem.

Here’s the text from my data file:

;Define variables needed for test.
;No space between label and value.
;Case does not matter.
SUT:eggplant-sut
SUTLogin:eggplant

Here’s my script:

try

--LOOK IN THE FOLDER UP ONE LEVEL  FROM THIS TEST SUITE FOR THE EGGPLANT.DAT   FILE.
set the Folder to "./"

--CREATE A GLOBAL PROPERTY LIST TO HOLD ALL THE VARIABLES BELOW.
Global globalVariables

--PARSE THROUGH EGGPLANT.DAT AND VARIABLE-IZE THE INFORMATION.
repeat with each line of file "Eggplant.dat" 
	
	put it
	
	if it does not contain ";" Then  --SEMICOLON INDICATES A COMMENT IN THE DATA FILE
		insert value(it) after globalVariables
	else
	end if 
	
end repeat

put globalVariables

put the number of properties in globalVariables into myNum
log "Number of properties in globalVariables = " && myNum

catch theError
put theError

end try

And I’m attaching a screenshot of the Debug window. It doesn’t like the colon in my data file. But I’ve tried numerous things to get past that, but haven’t found the magic bullet.

Thanks!

6

The insert command will always result in a list (not a property list) and the value() function will only work with properly formatted SenseTalk expressions (your data file would need parentheses on each line for this to work).

There are a number of ways to achieve what you want, but using the split by operator may be the easiest in this case. Try something like this:

repeat with each line of file "Eggplant.dat"
	if it doesn't begin with ";" then put it & return after data
end repeat

put data split by return and colon into globalVariables

Hopefully that will get you going.

7

Thanks so much!!! That works and gives me exactly the type of result I was looking for.

Thanks all for your help!!

–Aaron