On 11 Oct 2005, at 20:51, ES wrote:

> Kernel#p actually prints stuff, using #inspect rather than #to_s. So,
> my_array.inspect will give you the below String.

Right, so I can get access to the form shown by 'p'. Great!

>> "[[1.4, 2.2, 2.1, 4.2], [2.1, 3.1, 2.4, 2.2], [3.1, 1.3, 2.5, 2.1]]"
>> (and I should be able to go from here to :
>> "{{1.4, 2.2, 2.1, 4.2}, {2.1, 3.1, 2.4, 2.2}, {3.1, 1.3, 2.5, 2.1}}"
>> on my own :-)
>
> Yep, just do the exact inverse of how you got the normal Array syntax.
> Why do you need to translate it back to the same form, though?

I was hoping that nobody was going to ask :-). Oh well: the curly  
bracket format is AppleScript's list notation, and information is  
often passed around in AppleScript using lists and lists of lists.  
However, AppleScript lists are not very powerful (and there are  
hardly any built-in methods). This trick of passing a string version  
of a list to Ruby and making use of Ruby's more powerful methods  
works nicely once I learned how to get the information back from Ruby  
to AppleScript in list form.

thanks again all

Pete