I have a list of photo captions in a two-column CSV in this format:
"Filename","Caption"
I need to split the CSV into three columns like this
"Filename","Species","Caption"
The regular expression seems to work ok. So I think my usual failure to understand what's happening inside the For Each action is where it's going wrong. Any advice please?
Here are a couple of actions that I wrote to achieve what you want. I did it slightly differently from you because I was intimidated by that long regex. I put the sample material in the For Each text box, but you can change that to a variable easily enough.
Actions (v11.0.3)
Keyboard Maestro Actions.kmactions (3.5 KB)
I took a look at it. No, it doesn't look okay. I turned on the debugger and found out that the regex you are using is assigning the entire line into the third variable. I usually use the debugger to troubleshoot regex, but most people refer using the website "regex101.com". Or if you want a simpler regex that works, try using my macro instead.
One alternative to regular expressions:
ALTERNATIVE approach Export photo captions to CSV.kmmacros (6.2 KB)
const main = () =>
lines(kmvar.PhotoCSV)
.flatMap(
line => 0 < line.length
? (() => {
const parts = line.split(",");
return [
// Filename.
parts[0],
// Species with end quote.
`${parts[1]}"`,
// Caption with start quote.
[
`"${parts[2].trim()}`,
...parts.slice(3)
]
.join(",")
]
.join(",")
})()
: []
)
.join("\n");
// ----------------------- GENERIC -----------------------
// lines :: String -> [String]
const lines = s =>
// A list of strings derived from a single string
// which is delimited by \n or by \r\n or \r.
0 < s.length
? s.split(/\r\n|\n|\r/u)
: [];
// MAIN ---
return main();
The third action -- you're putting each line to process into the variable PhotoCaption but you're searching the entirety of PhotoCSV.
Remember, the commonest use for a "For Each" is to grab pieces of a larger thing to process each piece in turn:
Not sure whether the For Each lines collection depends on finding \n as the line delimiter,
but if it does, I think you may find that the CSV lines in the OP's source are \r delimited.
"Lines in" is EOL-agnostic -- a good reason to use it!
EOL Demo.kmactions (1.8 KB)
Note lack of a blank "Display Text" for the Windows EOL CRLF combo. Sweet!
and I guess another way to use it here (to place the missing " characters),
might be with custom (,) delimiters, and writing to indexed parts, in Keyboard Maestro variable arrays.
So, for example (using Variable Array assignments, with either "," or ", " as custom delimiter):
VARIABLE ARRAY approach to Export photo captions to CSV.kmmacros (6.6 KB)
If we can rely on the text format for that, then I think we can just do everything with a single global "Search and Replace":
Export photo captions to CSV (S'n'R).kmmacros (4.9 KB)
Searching for:
(?m)^"(.*?)","([^,]*),\s(.*)$
...and replacing with:
"\1","\2","\3
Thanks all, this was simply a case of changing the variable being searched inside the For Each action to PhotoCaption.