$String.split introduces extraneous "\"

Agents, Actions and Automation
1

Hi,

I have a TBX file for vocabulary (Welsh, but I don’t think that matters here…).

The $Name of each vocabulary note contains the Welsh headword, an en-dash, then the English definition. E.g.

am yr ail – alternatively

The prototype has the following code to split the name into two attributes $LangWelsh and $LangEnglish, based on the en-dash (which is only ever used once in a $Name):

	$MyList=$Name.split("–");
	$LangWelsh = $MyList.at(0);
	$LangEnglish = $MyList.at(1);

Screenshot 2026-07-22 at 11.39.58
Screenshot 2026-07-22 at 11.39.582814×526 154 KB

This works very well, unless there is an apostrophe in the $Name, when it becomes escaped with \:

Screenshot 2026-07-22 at 11.41.39
Screenshot 2026-07-22 at 11.41.391834×516 116 KB

(Note that $Names have dumb apostrophes, ' not ’.)

I can work around this with an additional .replace("\","") of course, but I wondered whether this is simply an inevitable artefact of the way split works, or perhaps a bug?

Or more likely, am I doing something wrong?

(BTW, $FirstLetter and $MySet are to deal with the fact that Welsh treats the letters ‘ll’, ‘dd’ etc as single letters, so I need to do some manipulation to get them to sort in the right order…)

Many thanks,

David

2

[edit: code correction is response to next post. Mea culpa!]

Yes, I see the issue.I don’t think it is .split() so much as the List creation ‘escaping’ a an unclosed single-quote delimited string. Not what you intended, but seemingly the code’s understanding of what it gets. For instance:

$MyList=$Name.split(" – ").replace("\\","");

Still generates a \r in the target List.

Either way, this still is not the desired result. A workaround for now (tested):

var:list vList=$Name.split(" – ");
$LangWelsh = vList.split(" – ").at(0).replace("\\","");
$LangEnglish = vList.split(" – ").at(1).replace("\\","");

Action Inspector: untitled 2026-07-22 13-06-31
Action Inspector: untitled 2026-07-22 13-06-311110×708 114 KB

Notes:

  • The spit, you actually want '- ’ , i.e. with the padding spaces, not ‘-’ to avoid stray white space (seen in $MyList in your code).
  • New the code works, we don’t want to use an attribute (that we don’t reset) so store an interim state. A ‘list’ type variable suffices.
  • To replace a backslash—Tinderbox’s own escape character_we need to escape it, so \\ not \.
3

That makes sense – thanks very much for the explanation and the smoothing out of my rough code!

4

Apologies, copied code direct from different tests. My earlier example above is now correct, as per you observation. :slight_smile:

1 Like
5

I’ll get this fixed. In the interim, consider typographic apostrophe ’ (cmd-shift-] on US keyboards) as a better apostrophe here.

6

and on UK keyboards a closing single typographic (‘curly’) quote is Opt+Shift+] ( ⌥+⇧+]).

7

Which is also true for US keyboards. This was a glitch in the prior response.