I have already used the text delimiters and item numbers to extract a date from a file name, so I'm clear about how to use these. Unfortunately the date on these particular files are formatted as "yyyyMMdd" and I need to covert the date into format "yyyy-MM-dd". I have been trying to use the offset function to get particular index positions, and I have found several examples of how you would return the offset of particular digits in the string, example:
set theposition to offset of 10 in theString -- this works
(which could return 5 or 7) but I have not found examples of how to call the digits at a specific index:
set _day to offset 7 of file_date_raw -- error
"Finder got an error: Some parameter is missing for offset." number -1701
How would you do this, or is there a totally better way I'm unaware of?
To "call the digits at a specific index", you use:
text 1 thru 4 of myString
If you know that each string has 8 characters in the yyyymmdd format, then you don't need to use 'offset' or any parsing, just add in the -'s, using text x thru y to dissect the string.
set d to "20011018"
set newString to (text 1 thru 4 of d) & "-" & (text 5 thru 6 of d) & "-" & (text 7 thru 8 of d)