Data
The data class represents raw data, a stream of bytes. It’s a catchall for situations when results cannot be displayed in any other way. For example:
tell application "Finder" activate get (the clipboard) end tell -- {«data RECT0000000000B40075», ¬ «data PICTFA480000000000B40075001102FF0C— ... and so on for pages and pages
What was on the clipboard was a picture, and the Script Editor has no way to display it (though Script Debugger can); so it uses the data class and just shows you the data. The first four letters of this data can be informative, because they represent a resource type; clearly what’s on the clipboard is a rectangle (probably the bounds of the picture) and a picture in PICT format.
It is also possible to form a data object yourself, by typing just
the sort of thing you see here: the word data
, a
space, and then the resource type and the data, in
guillemets
(«
»
).
However, this is an advanced technique and shouldn’t
arise much in real life (though an example of it was shown earlier in
this chapter).
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