How to define a line break in extendscript for Adobe Indesign

Question

I am using extendscript to build some invoices from downloaded plaintext emails (.txt)

At points in the file there are lines of text that look like "Order Number: 123456" and then the line ends. I have a script made from parts I found on this site that finds the end of "Order Number:" in order to get a starting position of a substring. I want to use where the return key was hit to go to the next line as the second index number to finish the substring. To do this, I have another piece of script from the helpful people of this site that makes an array out of the indexes of every instance of a character. I will then use whichever array object is a higher number than the first number for the substring.

It's a bit convoluted, but I'm not great with Javascript yet, and if there is an easier way, I don't know it.

What is the character I need to use to emulate a return key in a txt file in javascript for extendscript for indesign?

Thank you.

I have tried things like \n and \r\n and ^p both with and without quotes around them but none of those seem to show up in the array when I try them.

//Load Email as String

var b = new File("~/Desktop/Test/email.txt");

b.open('r');

var str = "";

while (!b.eof)

    str += b.readln();

b.close();

var orderNumberLocation = str.search("Order Number: ") + 14;


var orderNumber = str.substring(orderNumberLocation, ARRAY NUMBER GOES HERE)

var loc = orderNumberLocation.lineNumber


function indexes(source, find) {
    var result = [];
    for (i = 0; i < source.length; ++i) {
        // If you want to search case insensitive use 
        // if (source.substring(i, i + find.length).toLowerCase() == find) {
        if (source.substring(i, i + find.length) == find) {
            result.push(i);
        }
    }
    alert(result)
}

indexes(str, NEW PARAGRAPH CHARACTER GOES HERE)

I want all my line breaks to show up as an array of indexes in the variable "result".

Edit: My method of importing stripped all line breaks from the document. Using the code below instead works better. Now \n works.

var file = File("~/Desktop/Test/email.txt",  "utf-8");  
file.open("r");  

var str = file.read();  

file.close();  

Answer 1

Please try \n and \r

Example: indexes(str, "\r");

Answer 2

If i've understood well, wat you need is to str.split():

function indexes(source, find) {
    var order;
    var result = [];
    var orders = source.split('\n'); //returns an array of strings: ["order: 12345", "order:54321", ...]
    for (var i = 0, l = orders.length; i < l; i++)
    {
        order = orders[i];
        if (order.match(/find/) != null){
            result.push(i)
        }
    }
    return result;
}

Answer 3

You need to use Regular Expressions. Depending on the fields do you need to search, you'l need to tweek the regular expressions, but I can give you a point. If the fields on the email are separated by new lines, something like that will work:

var str; //your string
var fields = {}
var lookFor = /(Order Number:|Adress:).*?\n/g;

str.replace(lookFor, function(match){
    var order = match.split(':'); 
    var field = order[0].replace(/\s/g, '');//remove all spaces
    var value = order[1];
    fields[field]= value;
})

With (Order Number:|Adress:) you are looking for the fields, you can add more fields separated the by the or character | ,inside the parenthessis. The .*?\n operators matches any character till the first break line appears. The g flag indicates that you want to look for all matches. Then you call str.replace, beacause it allows you to perfom a single task on each match. So, if the separator of the field and the value is a colon ':', then you split the match into an array of two values: ['Order number', 12345], and then, store that matches into an object. That code wil produce:

fields = {
    OrderNumber: 12345,
    Adresss: "my fake adress 000"
}