> My real script did have two problem but they were quite different, and might > be of interest.
I'm glad you brought these up - for others reading this there are some "best practices" to learn about these things: > 1. I had constructed a Windows-style path with "\" characters to fit in with > a small VB script I wanted to run. This does work in some contexts, but not > in this one: in normal circumstances (but not AFAICS in VB scripts) LC looks > after the change from "/" to "\". I forgot that it was this path in the > variable I was testing. It gave a strange result, but the obvious answer is > "don't do it". Right. If you *do* need to construct a "\"-delimited path for external use (for example, if you're creating a VBScript in LiveCode that you want to execute with "do … as VBScript"), then do your "/"-to-"\" conversions *just before* you use it, and do the conversion on a variable that's not going to be used again in that handler (like a temporary copy of a variable or one that is solely for the purpose of passing off to VBScript). For example: put specialFolderPath("desktop") & "MyFile.txt" into tFile -- maybe some other code goes here put replaceText(tFile,"/","\") into tTempFile -- construct VBScript using the tTempFile variable -- keeps tFile safe if you need to work with it later > 2. The form of my 'if' condition was > > if there is not a file myPath &"/" & myfilename > > it turns out that the 'there is no' statement doesn't construct the string > before the evaluation: you have to ensure the evaluation of the string by > putting it in brackets as in > > if there is not a file (myPath &"/" & myfilename) > > There is an obscure warning about this in the dictionary: "The there is no > operator is implemented internally as a function, and therefore has lower > precedence than other operators". So it's a precedence issue. One thing I've gotten into the habit of doing is to always surround concatenation and logic operations (especially those with symbols) in parentheses - apart from being more readable, it also saves headaches if the interpreter sees things differently than you intended. Examples: put ("This is" && "a test") into tVar if (tVar <> "") then … For multiple logic operations it is even more important. Compare: if tVar > 100 and tFileName contains " " or tVar = 0 then vs. if ((tVar > 100) and (tFileName contains " ")) or (tVar = 0) then Just my 2 cents, Ken Ray Sons of Thunder Software, Inc. Email: k...@sonsothunder.com Web Site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/ _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode