AppleScript separating one text file into many at Paragraph break

The split command available in the bash shell does exactly what you need here.

Launch Terminal.app and enter man split for details.

AppleScript (if you need to use that implementation language for some reason here, and can't just directly use a shell script) can invoke a shell script on your behalf.

There are different ways to do this in AppleScript. The easiest, maybe, would be as follows:

set filePath to "/path/to/textfile.txt"

set txtPs to every paragraph of (read filePath)

set basePath to text 1 thru -5 of filePath

repeat with i from 1 to count of txtPs

set fp to open for access (basePath & " " & i & ".txt") with write permission

set eof of fpto 0

write item i of txtPs to fp

close accessfp

end repeat

of course, with the particular format of the text you'll end up with a set of blank documents,but you can just discard those. the issue is that the visual paragraph format is actually 'linefeed-space-linefeed', and I suspect you copied this of the web because it looks like the space is actually a character. you could tweak the script so that it discarded the empties docs itself, but unless you do this a lot, tweaking it is probably more trouble than tossing out the extras.

"Can’t make "/user/administrator/test.txt" into type file." I am pretty sure I have the path correct…

Try "/Users/administrator/test.txt".

Message was edited by: Pierre L. (correction to the path)

I'm sorry to revive an old post, but I need to do something similar.

I have a text file full of a collection of articles I've pulled from a database and I want to split them and put them into separate files, where the text file is titled "prefix_suffix" and the individual articles would need to be titled "prefix_a[number of article]_suffix" (the "a" before the number is intended to indicate that it's an article).

It's possible to tell that an article has finished because there's a copyright notice at the bottom ("All Rights Reserved"), so every time the script bumps into that string, it would have to put the text between that string and the previous one into a separate file.

Do you think this is possible? If so, how would I do that?

I did find an old .app that was supposed to do that, but it seems that it uses deprecated code, so it won't work on my mac...

Thanks a lot!

Next time please start a separate thread for a new problem. it makes it easier for others who might be searching for help through the archives.

This script should do it (I haven't tested it, but it's really straightforward):

set f to choose file with prompt "Choose the file to parse."

set fold to (choose folder with prompt "Choose a folder to store the files in.") as text

tell application "Finder"

set fName to name of f

end tell

set fp to open for accessf

set bigText to read fp

close accessfp

set parsingText to "All Rights Reserved"

set parsedList to tid(bigText, parsingText)

-- the following line requires that the file name be exactly in the form "<prefix>_<suffix>" with only one underscore

set {prefix, suffix} to tid(fName, "_")

repeat with i from 1 to count of parsedList

set newFName to prefix & "_a[" & i & "]_" & suffix

set fp to open for access (fold & newFName) with write permission

-- uncomment the following line if you need to overwrite old files, otherwise it will append

-- set EOF of fp to 0

write ((itemi of parsedList & parsingText) as text) tofp

close accessfp

end repeat

on tid(input, delim)

-- a subroutine to handle text item delimiters. Useful tool, but so danged wordy.--

set {oldTID, my text item delimiters} to {my text item delimiters, delim}

if class of input is list then

set output to input as text

else

set output to text items of input

end if

set my text item delimiters to oldTID

return output

end tid

That is absolutely brilliant. It does exactly what I want. Thank you!

Just one little extra thing, is there any way to get the name of the folder that is produced to be the name of the initial file, rather than having to select one manually?

Thanks a lot! You've just saved me at least ten man hours of work^^

sure: delete line 2 and replace the finder tell block in lines 4-6 with the following:

tell application "Finder"

set fName to name of f

-- the following line assumes that the file name has a three character extension, like '.txt'

set foldName to text 1 thru -5 of fName

set fold to (makenewfolderat (path todocuments folderfromuser domain) with properties {name:foldName}) as text

end tell

That creates a new folder in your documents folder with the same name as the original file (minus the extension) and stores it in the same variable 'fold'. You might need to tweak it a little - change the path to a different location, change things if it has a different file extension - but you can probably figure that out.