is there something akin to regEx in applescript, and if not, what's the alternative?

Question

I need to parse the first 10 chars of a file name to see if they are all digits. The obvious way to do this is fileName =~ m/^\\d{10}/ but I\'m not seeing anything regExy i

Answer 1

I'm sure there is an Applescript Addition or a shell script that can be called to bring regex into the fold, but I avoid dependencies for the simple stuff. I use this style pattern all the time...

set filename to "1234567890abcdefghijkl"

return isPrefixGood(filename)

on isPrefixGood(filename) --returns boolean
    set legalCharacters to {"1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "0"}

    set thePrefix to (characters 1 thru 10) of filename as text

    set badPrefix to false

    repeat with thisChr from 1 to (get count of characters in thePrefix)
        set theChr to character thisChr of thePrefix
        if theChr is not in legalCharacters then
            set badPrefix to true
        end if
    end repeat

    if badPrefix is true then
        return "bad prefix"
    end if

    return "good prefix"
end isPrefixGood