In addition to creating new documents, scripts may be called upon to edit existing documents, including locating and replacing words in the main body text. The current Pages scripting dictionary does not contain a search command, so editing long text flows efficiently requires the use of a script sub-routine optimized for that purpose.

The sub-routine included in the following example script (replaceWordWithStringInBodyText) is designed to work with long documents, by targeting the search and replace process at the paragraph-level, reducing the amount of text a script processes at a time. In addition, the script works from the end of the document to the beginning, thereby avoiding any issues with possible script-triggered reflow of the document.

The Long Document Example

In this example, the script will find and replace all of the occurrences of “Alice” in the “Alice in Wonderland” book by Lewis Carroll.

DO THIS ►For use with this tutorial DOWNLOAD the example Alice in Wonderland Pages document.

DO THIS ► For execution optimization, open the example script in the AppleScript Editor application, and then install (save) it into the system-wide Script Menu (instructions). Once installed, run the script from the Script Menu.

Here’s a script for demonstrating replacing a word with a text string, in a long document:

Find-Change Example
Open in AppleScript Editor
01		tell application "Pages"
02		activate
03		display dialog "This script will replace all occurences of “Alice” and “Alice's” with “Wanda” and “Wanda's” in the “Alice in Wonderland” example Pages document." with icon 1 buttons {"Cancel", "Download Document", "Begin"} default button 3
04		if the button returned of the result is "Download Document" then
05		open location "http://iworkautomation.com/pages/body-text-replace.html"
06		else
07		my replaceWordWithStringInBodyText("Alice", "Wanda")
08
09		set thisTitle to "Pages: Find & Change"
10		set thisNotification to "Beginning 2nd replacement…"
11		set thisSubtitle to "“Alice” to “Wanda” completed."
12		my displaythisNotification(thisTitle, thisNotification, thisSubtitle)
13
14		my replaceWordWithStringInBodyText("Alice's", "Wanda's")
15
16		set thisNotification to "Replacement completed: “Alice's” to “Wanda's”"
17		set thisSubtitle to ""
18		my displaythisNotification(thisTitle, thisNotification, thisSubtitle)
19		end if
20		end tell
21
22		on displaythisNotification(thisTitle, thisNotification, thisSubtitle)
23		tell current application
24		display notification thisNotification with title thisTitle subtitle thisSubtitle
25		end tell
26		end displaythisNotification
27
28		on replaceWordWithStringInBodyText(searchWord, replacementString)
29		tell application "Pages"
30		activate
31		tell the front document
32		tell body text
33		-- start at the end and go to the beginning
34		repeat with i from the (count of paragraphs) to 1 by -1
35		tell paragraph i
36		repeat
37		try
38		if exists searchWord then
39		set (last word where it is searchWord) to replacementString
40		else
41		exit repeat
42		end if
43		on error errorMessage
44		exit repeat
45		end try
46		end repeat
47		end tell
48		end repeat
49		end tell
50		end tell
51		return true
52		end tell
53		end replaceWordWithStringInBodyText

TIP:For another example of the use of this sub-routine for performing text replacement, view the Mail Merge example.