Is it complicated to write an AppleScript to count the number of lines starting with #?

macOS
1

I would like to count the number of header lines in a mardown text, ie basically count the number of lines starting with # (hashtag) (ie ⌃# in regex terms) in the clipboard (I will start by copying the text to the clipboard)
thanks in advance for your time and help

2

I’m not sure about AppleScript, but it’s fairly easy to do with a shell script (and you can call a shell script from AppleScript, so maybe that will suffice?)


pbpaste | egrep -c '^#'

pbpaste says “show me all of the text on the pasteboard/clipboard”

| says “filter the information on the left through the program on the right”

egrep will search for text using regular expressions

-c tells egrep to return a count of the lines which match.

^# is what you are searching for, which you seem to already know from other regex experience.

4 Likes
3

a great solution.
I can implement with keyboard maestro
thanks very much !

4

FWIW, if, for any reason you did want to do this in a monolingual osascript context (rather than polyglotally farming some part of it out to a combination of shell semantics + a kleene algebra :slight_smile:

then one approach would be to define (in JS) what happens to the total count at the margin:

// talliedHeading :: (Int, String) -> Int
const talliedHeading = (total, s) =>
    s.startsWith('#') ? (
        1 + total
    ) : total;

and plug that into .reduce – the JS version of the more general [fold pattern](http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~pszgmh/fold.pdf).

So broadly, something like this:

(() => {
    'use strict';

    // main :: IO ()
    const main = () =>
        readFile('~/Desktop/withHeadings.md')
        .split(/[\r\n]+/)
        .reduce(talliedHeading, 0);


    // talliedHeading :: (Int, String) -> Int
    const talliedHeading = (total, s) =>
        s.startsWith('#') ? (
            1 + total
        ) : total;


    // --------------------- GENERIC ---------------------

    // readFile :: FilePath -> IO String
    const readFile = fp => {
        // The contents of a text file at the
        // path file fp.
        const
            e = $(),
            ns = $.NSString
            .stringWithContentsOfFileEncodingError(
                $(fp).stringByStandardizingPath,
                $.NSUTF8StringEncoding,
                e
            );
        return ObjC.unwrap(
            ns.isNil() ? (
                e.localizedDescription
            ) : ns
        );
    };

    // MAIN ---
    return main();
})();
2 Likes
5

Right; I wondered why AppleScript.

And I make the linkage to a similarish-sounding post elsewhere.