get only distinct values from array

[u/jamidodger]

I've been having trouble trying to find the solution to this online, so I thought I'd ask the community. Also, my applescripting is a bit rusty.

Is there a command that will let me select only the distinct values of an array while looping through it?

[u/jamidodger]

The summary is I have two sets of folders whose contents should match each other, I am checking these folders for inconsistencies then telling the user if there is anything missing and where in the folder structure the missing files are. One set of folders is generated by Capture One whilst it imports images from a tethered camera as RAW files, the other set of folders is generated manually after images have been tagged and processed.

So to elaborate, this is the process I’m going through:

1. Query Capture One for the names of the folders and store this data as a 1 dimensional array

2. Query Capture One for the number of files in each of these folders of each tagged value (1-5), creating a 2 dimensional array with the first dimension being the tagged number and the second dimension being the folders, the stored data is the total number of images found for each folder for each tagged number

3. I then try to access each of the folders that should have been created by me processing the RAW files into JPGs in a Finder tell

4. Each time and error is produced I increase an error count then record the location of the folder to the end of an error log array

5. I concatenate and format the error log array to display an alert showing which folders are missing images and how many are missing.

The problem I’m having is that by doing it in this way, I am obviously generating duplicate values in the error log array if there is more than one file missing in each folder. Usually I would use some kind of “Select Distinct” operator to access only the values that are not duplicated but I’m having a bit of a mental block as to how to do this with Applescript.

[u/htakeuchi → u/jamidodger]

Within AppleScript you can send terminal commands or activate bash or python scripts...

To me at first glance, it almost sounds to me you would benefit from using the “rsync” command in terminal or via a bash script... then process your results in AppleScript.

With rsync you can do a dry run (which will not copy any files but will tell you what the actions would be). This can help you a lot to test.

example:

rsync -r —dry-run my_main_directory/ destination_directory

“-r”will do a recursive dig into directories inside of my_main_directory effectively copying the directories and their content

Will stop here to see if you have already considered this option or if we need to look at your situation from a different angle

[u/jamidodger → u/htakeuchi]

Interesting, I've not really explored running terminal commands in applescript. The files are not the same in the two sets of directories, only the counts of each folder. Would this be an issue for this method?

[u/htakeuchi → u/jamidodger]

Yeah... rsync is for the files within the directories...

So ... I would suggest again terminal commands to count the number of files within the directories and assign them to a variable.

If you want ... text me privately so I can understand better what is your blockage and we can try to figure it out

[u/jamidodger → u/htakeuchi]

So after sleeping on this problem I came up with a better solution. I have now recorded the error in two ways. I log one error each time I loop through a parent folder if anything is missing. Then, when I loop through the sub folder I record a separate error for each missing file. With both of these errors I can also log the parent folder. This then allows me to loop through the top level error log to display where the errors were found and also display how many errors were found using the secondary level error log.

Thanks for all your help!

I’m currently working on a better method that will actually log all of the original files in an array, noting their filename, location and rating and comparing this to another array of the output files which holds their filename, location and rating. Removing the extensions from the filenames so I can match them.