I’ve spent some time lately exploring searching and replacing techniques in a variety of scripting languages. I hope to share some of these experiences later. Right now I wanted to briefly share a tip when searching for text using VBScript. This is a common task and one that causes many novice scripters more than a little grief.

In an earlier post, I showed you how to make your scripts talk back. Well, you can also use the SAPI object to “speak” a wav file. Imagine having a script play a sound when it finishes a long query or process. This is pretty easy to do.

A few days ago I showed how to call an Open File dialog box. I promised to show you how to let a user specify a filename and path by browsing using the File dialog box. This is much better than using an input box, especially when you want to save the file to a specific folder where you don’t know the full path off the top of your head.

As you develop more and more scripts, you’re bound to find yourself working with files. Often, the easiest thing to do is to hard code a filename that we want to open and use. Or we may provide a run time parameter for a file name. Wouldn’t it be nice to be give the user an option to browse for the file like other Windows apps? If your script is running on Windows XP or Windows 2003, you can use the SAFRCFileDlg object.

I’ve been toying around with text to speech in scripts both in VBScript and PowerShell. I thought I’d share some thoughts and techniques for working with these objects. I’m still trying to find a truly practical need for this in an administrative script, but this is interesting technology to kick around.