[TxMt] filtering command with CocoaDialog

[Eric Hsu]

hi folks,

Another tip I thought I'd share.  I often have situations where I 
have to discard all lines in a file that start with a number, or 
other cleanup tasks like that.  Now, you can use TM's  Text>Filter 
Through Command... and then use grep or grep -v. But I have a hard 
time remembering grep's regexp format. It's already all I can do to 
remember TM's and Perl's.

So I wanted to write a command to pop up a GUI input field so I could 
enter in a Perl regexp for lines to match with two buttons so I could 
either Keep only the matching lines or Discard the matching lines.

So what I did was toss together a quick script in Perl and use 
CocoaDialog as a front-end.  To use this, you need to download 
CocoaDialog from <http://cocoadialog.sourceforge.net/download.html>, 
and put it in /Applications.  (If you don't like that place, change 
the path in the script.)

If you don't have a need for this script, you still might be able to 
get some mileage out of CocoaDialog. It is a simple way to get GUI 
onto any script that talks to the command-line. It has a number of 
different window formats. Pashua is neat, but it requires use-ing a 
module, and Platypus is more for creating drag-and-drop things.

good luck, Eric

---
TM Command.

Before: nothing
Command:
my$CD="/Applications/CocoaDialog.app/Contents/MacOS/CocoaDialog";my$rv=`$CD 
inputbox --title "Filter with Regexp" --no-newline \\ 
--informative-text "Filter lines matching this Perl regular 
expression:" \\    --text "" \\    --button1 "Keep" --button2 
"Discard" \\    --width 
500`;my($button_rv,$term)=split/\n/,$rv,2;while(<STDIN>){if($button_rv==2){unless(/$term/){print;}}elsif($button_rv==1){if(/$term/){print;}}}

Stdin: selected
Stdout: replace selected


-- 
Eric Hsu, Assistant Professor of Mathematics
San Francisco State University
erichsu at math.sfsu.edu
http://math.sfsu.edu/hsu