A pretty common task in any document editing environment is running find and replace operations. If you have a character that’s repeated, and you want to replace every instance of that character with a different character, then running a find and replace is the fastest way to do it. What happens if you need to execute these operations many times on different documents? You could run Find and Replace and type the information in each time but it’s often a much easier solution to just write a small Legato function. You can execute the Legato function from the Tools menu to run a common find and replace operation. I know in previous blog posts I’ve done similar scripts to replace wingdings characters with character entities, or to replace certain inline tags with other inline tags. For this week’s blog script, I took those previous scripts and made a more generic version, that can be easily modified by anyone to do different find and replace operations.

Legato is an interpreted language, but even so, it performs quite quickly. Most scripts will execute within a second or so, even if it’s the script contains relatively complex HTML parsing or something similar. However, occasionally there are scripts that iterate over extremely large data sets, or work with file IO, or really do anything that can take a long time. If the script is just running, unless you put up some sort of a progress bar, it might look like the application has frozen to the user. Therefore, it’s really important to put up a progress bar to let the user know what’s going on with the script. I’ve put together a simple example script of a progress bar below, but let’s talk about how to use one first.