AppleScript: how do I store folders' pathnames into an array, replacing spaces with “\ ”?

Question

I have a folder and inside this folder there's a bunch of subfolders. Using AppleScript I wish to store the pathnames of these subfolders into an array.

Here's my problem: each pathname containing " " (spaces), I want to replace with pathnames containing UNIX-friendly "\ " notation (backslash followed by a space; as in /my/fancy\ path/).

As you can see, I'm only half-way through my goal here. I've spent a good night's worth of laborious attempts, fooling around with replace_chars subroutines, do shell script-with-sed combos and who knows what. No dice.

tell application "Finder"

    set myRepos to name of folders of folder ("/Users/hced/Dropbox/GitHub/" as POSIX file)
    --> {"320andup", "Baseline.js (jQuery & vanilla JS version)", "Bootstrap (HTML, CSS, and JS toolkit from Twitter)", "Chirp.js (Tweets on your website, simply)", "Coordino"}

end tell

Edit: a valid path example would be /Users/hced/Dropbox/GitHub/A\ folder\ named\ with\ spaces

Answer 1

Reading your question, I'm not sure if you are able to use quoted path names instead of escaping the spaces...

tell application "Finder"
        set folderGitHub to folder ("/Users/hced/Dropbox/GitHub/" as POSIX file)

        set listFolders to (every folder in folderGitHub as alias list)
end tell

set listPosixPathsQuoted to {}

repeat with aliasFolder in listFolders
        set listPosixPathsQuoted to listPosixPathsQuoted & {quoted form of POSIX path of aliasFolder}
end repeat

Answer 2

This should do it:

tell application "Finder"
    set myRepos to name of folders of folder ("/Users/hced/Dropbox/GitHub/" as POSIX file)
end tell

repeat with theIndex from 1 to number of items in myRepos
    set item theIndex in myRepos to replace_chars(item theIndex in myRepos, " ", "\\ ")
end repeat

return myRepos

on replace_chars(this_text, search_string, replacement_string)
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to the search_string
    set the item_list to every text item of this_text
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to the replacement_string
    set this_text to the item_list as string
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
    return this_text
end replace_chars

This takes the folder names, which you got already, and loops over each item in the list replacing every space character with \. Note that the backslash needs to be escaped, and that AppleScript Editor displays the strings as including the double backslash. However you can verify that they're properly escaped with a single backslash by doing set the clipboard to item 2 of myRepos and pasting the resulting text into a text editor — it's just a quirk of AppleScript Editor.

The replace_chars function is a fairly standard boilerplate. I copied it from Mac OS X Automation.

Answer 3

Trash Man's handler posted on MacScripter will escape all of the problem characters...

set myFolder to quoted form of "/Users/hced/Dropbox/GitHub/"

    set theFolders to every paragraph of (do shell script "find " & myFolder & " -type d -depth 1 ")
    set escFolders to {}

    repeat with aFolder in theFolders
        set end of escFolders to escape_string(aFolder as text)
    end repeat

    on escape_string(input_string)
    set output_string to ""
    set escapable_characters to " !#^$%&*?()={}[]'`~|;<>\"\\"
    repeat with chr in input_string
        if (escapable_characters contains chr) then
            set output_string to output_string & "\\" -- This actually adds ONE \ to the string.
        else if (chr is equal to "/") then
            set output_string to output_string & ":" -- Swap file system delimiters
        end if
        set output_string to output_string & chr
    end repeat
    return output_string as text
end escape_string