Removing Blank Lines

Eggplant Functional
1

Howdy, All–

I have the following code to remove selected lines from a file:

	repeat with each line of epsData
		put it into theLine
		if theLine contains "%%Title" 
			delete theLine from epsData
		else if theLine contains "%%Creator:" 
			delete theLine from epsData
		else if theLine contains "%%CreationDate" 
			delete theLine from epsData
		else
		end if
	end repeat

Works great, however I now have blank lines in the file. Any ideas on how I can squeeze these out or modify the above command to ensure no blank lines exist?

Thanks!
Allen

2

Have you tried this:


 repeat with each line of epsData
      put it into theLine
      if theLine contains "%%Title"
         delete theLine from epsData
      else if theLine contains "%%Creator:"
         delete theLine from epsData
      else if theLine contains "%%CreationDate"
         delete theLine from epsData
      else if theLine is empty
        delete line repeatIndex() of epsData
      end if
 end repeat
3

When you’re iterating through things (lines, in your case) that you may want to modify or delete, I suggest using “by reference” which allows SenseTalk to refer back to the line in the source value:

repeat with each line theLine of epsData by reference 
      if theLine contains "%%Title" 
         delete theLine 
      else if theLine contains "%%Creator:" 
         delete theLine
      else if theLine contains "%%CreationDate" 
         delete theLine 
      end if 
end repeat

I think that will do what you want.

4

You also may want to try this example out…


put <<PS>> into psData

-- add your tokens here to delete
set tokens to ( "%%Title:", "%%Creator:", "%%CreationDate:" )

-- delete the line if it starts with a token
repeat with each line in psData by reference
        if word 1 of it is in tokens then delete it
end repeat

put psData
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