Italicize a specified string inside of a field in FileMaker Pro

Question

I administer a simple Filemaker Pro 12 database for a company. The current project we are working on requires us to italicize proper names. For example, If the database was movie database I would have the following caption:

Wendy, Peter Pan

At the moment all captions like these are stored in one field, I would normally have two fields to separate the proper name from the character name, but doing so at this point would be very time consuming. I would like to make a script the italicizes the property names in this field, by looping through an array of proper names, and when a match is found it italicizes that name. This would be extremely useful, normally I could do this easily with another language, but Filemakers scripting language is foreign to me. This is simple in other languages using a foreach loop with a string array. Is there a simple solution someone can point me in the direction of.

Answer 1

You could probably loop through the list of proper names (where is it, and in what form?) and set the field to a calculation using:

Substitute ( field ; searchString ; TextStyleAdd ( searchString ; italic ) )

where searchString is the current value of the inner loop. The outer loop is, of course, looping through all found records. Hard to be more specific with so few details.

That said, IMHO it would take no more time and effort to fix the real problem here once and for all, i.e. separate the two facts into two individual fields.

Note also that there is an assumption here that the proper names match only themselves; for example, "Peter Pan, Peter Pan" would become "Peter Pan, Peter Pan" using the above method.