Ctags from SubEthaEdit to the Shell

In the last few posts on Ctags, I've presented shell scripts for locating a tag file and looking up a tag in it, and AppleScripts for identifying what tag file should be used and what tag to search for in it. In this post, I'll present AppleScript handlers that bridge between these two scripting systems. As in the previous post, I'll use my SubEthaEditTools to simplify the process.

Essentially, the handler will need to construct a shell command that invokes look to find a tag in the tag file. Beyond that, I'll include the option to post-process the matching lines, which I'll use for text completion. For finding the definition of a tag, no post-processing is needed, so the handler checks for an empty pipeline and handles it cleanly.

The handler is:

to pipeMatches of tag out of tagfile thru pipeline
  ignoring white space
    if "" is equal to pipeline then
      set postProcess to ""
    else
      set postProcess to "| " & pipeline
    end if
  end ignoring
  set lookupScript to (join of {UnixPath, "look ", tag, quoted form of tagfile, postProcess} by space)
  try
    do shell script lookupScript
  on error
    error "Pipeline failed to process tag matches" number 902
  end try
  paragraphs of the result
end pipeMatches

Note that the handler ends by taking the paragraphs of the shell script result. This converts the lines selected by look (and any post-processing) into a list of matches.

With the two use cases in mind, the user will need to pick a relevant tag or tags from the list of matches. With text completion, only one selection makes sense, but more than one might be OK for finding definitions. Here's a handler for the two cases:

to pickTags from taglist given multipleSelectionsAllowed:allowMultiple
  try
    if allowMultiple then
      choose from list taglist with title "Matching tags" with prompt "Select tag:" default items (first item of taglist) with multiple selections allowed
      join of result by "\n"
    else
      choose from list taglist with title "Matching tags" with prompt "Select tag:" default items (first item of taglist)
      first item of the result
    end if
  on error
    -- user canceled, do nothing
    error number 901
  end try
end pickTags

We're nearly done. What remains is to assemble all these handlers into AppleScripts for the two use cases, adding whatever specifics are needed for the two tasks.