Language Guide

CHAPTER 6

Expressions

Operations 171

The expression x = y in the following statement is false, because the

containers are different.

tell document "Intro" of application 

"Scriptable Text Editor"

set x to a reference to word 1 of paragraph 1

set y to a reference to word 1

x = y

end tell

--result:false

When you use references in expressions without the A Reference To operator,

the values of the objects speciﬁed in the references are used to evaluate the

expressions. For example, the result of the following expression is true if both

documents begin with the same word.

word 1 of document "Report" = word 1 document "Intro"

STRING

Two strings are equal if they are both the same series of characters. They are

not equal if they are different series of characters. AppleScript compares strings

character by character. It does not distinguish uppercase from lowercase letters

unless you use a Considering statement to consider the case attribute. For

example, the following expression is true.

"DUMPtruck" is equal to "dumptruck"

AppleScript considers all characters and punctuation, including spaces, tabs,

return characters, diacritical marks, hyphens, periods, commas, question

marks, semicolons, colons, exclamation points, backslash characters, and single

and double quotation marks in string comparisons. AppleScript ignores style in

string comparisons.