Applescripts. How do I add a text_object/code snippet to the end of certain lines in a text document?

Question

I'm using an Applescript to find-and-replace certain characters or strings of characters in BBEdit to speed up the process of ripping content out of a Microsoft Word document and wrapping it in html before it goes into a CMS. Most of this is fine when it's a replace-all type of command. However, I can't figure out how to amend the end of a line with a closing H tag.

For instance, the following line does a great job of wrapping paragraphs in P tags: replace "\\n\\n" using "</p>\\n<p>" searching in text 1 of text document 1 options {starting at top:true}

And I have a solution for adding h tags to the front of the a line. However, I can't figure out how to amend the end of a line with a closing h tag, and that's what I'm hoping to get some help with.

I'm looking for something that follows this logic: "If a line begins with <h3>, add </h3> to the end of the line." OR "When a line begins with <h3>, replace the next \\n with </h3>\\n."

If there's something that works within the Applescript (rather than a shell), that would be ideal, as I am fairly new to this and haven't taught myself anything about shells just yet.

Answer 1

You can solve this efficiently using BBEdit's built in regular expressions support, like so:

tell application "BBEdit"
    tell text window 1
        tell contents
            replace "^(\\<h3\\>)(.*)$" using "\\1\\2<\\\\h3>" options {search mode:grep, starting at top:true}
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

This adds closing tags for all h3 elements.

Answer 2

I figured it out after one of the respondents to my original post pointed me in the right direction. (This exchange in a Google Group was also pretty helpful.)

I don't know if this is "correct" but it does what I was hoping it could do: It adds a string to the end every line that begins with something specific.

-- This tell will find h3 tags and add a closing tag to the end of the line. It adds a space before the opening h3 tag so that it won't loop forever, and then the second tell removes that extra space once the loop finishes.  
tell application "BBEdit"  
    tell text window 1  
        set loop_while_true to true  
        repeat while true  
            set find_h3 to find "^<h3>(.*)" options {search mode:grep, starting at top:loop_while_true} with selecting match  
            set loop_while_true to false  
            if found of find_h3 then  
                set my_h3 to found text of find_h3  
                replace my_h3 using (" " & my_h3 & "</h3>\\n") options {starting at top:true, returning results:true, wrap around:true}  
            else  
                exit repeat  
            end if  
        end repeat  
    end tell  
end tell  
-- this will clean up the extra space introduced during the loop sequence.  
tell text 1 of text document 1  
    replace " <h3>" using "<h3>" options {search mode:grep, starting at top:true, returning results:true, wrap around:true}  
end tell