Language Guide

APPENDIX B

Scriptable Text Editor Dictionary

320 Scriptable Text Editor Object Class Deﬁnitions

NOTES

The AppleScript English language dialect supports the abbreviation app for

referring to objects of class application. For example, the following statements

are equivalent:

cut the selection of application "Scriptable Text Editor"

cut the selection of app "Scriptable Text Editor"

The window and document element classes can be used interchangeably. This

is because each open document has a window, whose elements and properties

are always the same as those of its document. For example, if the ﬁrst open

document is named Giant, the ﬁrst window is also named Giant. A Scriptable

Text Editor document and its window contain the same text elements, so

references to text elements in a document and its window can be used

interchangeably. For example, word 1 of document "Giant" and word

1 of window "Giant" refer to the same word.

Text item objects are series of contiguous characters that are separated from

each other by special characters called delimiters. The Text Item Delimiters

property of the Scriptable Text Editor application consists of a list of characters

that can be used to separate text item objects. At startup the default value of the

Scriptable Text Editor’s Text Item Delimiters property is a single-item list that

contains a comma: {","}. You can set this delimiter to a different value or add

additional delimiters, but the new values are lost when the user quits the

application. You may ﬁnd it convenient to alter the Text Item Delimiters

property temporarily if you are dealing with multilingual text or text formatted

with other delimiters.

The Clipboard property is a list of objects of class Data, but you can use the

As operator to get the Clipboard as a string, reference, or styled text. The

Scriptable Text Editor coerces the data to the requested type, if possible.

tell application "Scriptable Text Editor"

cut word 1 of front document

get clipboard as string

end tell

--result: the first word of the document as a string