Find all occurances of a string in a Text member

 

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This movie script will search & optionally highlight all occurances of a string in a text member. It will return a property list of positions with a hit count ie:[#hitPositions:[58,151],#hits:2] hitList = findAllChars("string","textMember",{rgb(0,0,255)}) The color parameter is optional.

-- Written by Mark A. Boyd -- No copyright since I"ve posted variants of this script all over the place. -- Please send questions/comments/improvements to mblists@san.rr.com -- A working example is posted at http://www.mboyd.com/director/findallchars.html -- 27-Apr-2000 v1.1 -- Modified first repeat loop for indefinite iterations. on findAllChars whichString, whichMember, whichColor    stringCount = whichString.length - 1    theText = member(WhichMember).text    textCount = theText.length    outList = [#hitPositions:[],#hits:0]    charColorList = []    currentOffset = 0    -- Begin Search    flag = 0    repeat while not flag      -- offset() returns only the first position      firstPos = offset(whichString, theText)      if firstPos then        -- get the position of the last char in the search string.        lastPos = firstPos + stringCount        -- remember position offsets from original, unmodified text.        newFirstPos = firstPos + currentOffset        newLastPos = newFirstPos + stringCount        -- add positions to temporary list for coloring.        -- also used in counting the number of hits.        charColorList.add([newFirstPos,newLastPos])        -- append positions to the output list.        outList.hitPositions.append(firstPos+currentOffset)        -- delete up to the last position so that offset()        -- can find the next position.        theText = theText.char[lastPos + 1..textCount]        currentOffset = currentOffset + lastPos        textCount = theText.length      else        -- no more hits from offset()        flag = 1      end if    end repeat    -- Begin highlighting (if color parameter provided)    if not whichColor.voidP then      listCount = charColorList.count      if listCount then        repeat with i = 1 to listCount          theChars = charColorList[i]          member(whichMember).char[theChars[1]..theChars[2]].color = whichColor        end repeat      end if    end if    outList.hits = charColorList.count    return outList end