Lists in ScriptFTP

ScriptFTP, as many script languages, does not have data types. This makes the script language and its syntax a lot easier to learn but not as powerful as others. Think of it as being “not so descriptive” and “less complex”. The drawback, in practice, is that you cannot handle things like “lists”,”sets” etc. Everything is a plain text string and you need to deal with this limitation to get the things done.

Regarding to the lists. How can the FTP script handle a list? There is a shortcut:

$my_list = "my_item_number_1|my_item_number_2|my_item_number_3"
 
FOREACH $item_name IN $my_list
     PRINT($item_name)
END FOREACH

Running the script you get:

my_item_number_1
my_item_number_2
my_item_number_3

You can store multiple text string in the same variable using the | character, also known as the “pipe character”. If you have never typed this character note that depending on the language of your keyboard it is located in a different key. If you cannot find it try searching google for “where is the pipe character in the UK keyboard?”, for example. It seems to be a typical question.

Why the pipe character? Because it is a weird character, you will not find it in file names or directories and using simply a space characters to separate the items in the list is not a valid solution because files or directories, as you know, can contain spaces.

A real example (and the most common one) to use lists in FTP scripts are file names. In fact, there is a command in ScriptFTP (GETLIST) that builds a file list in a variable for you. For instance:

# Get the remote file listing, store it in $list
GETLIST($list,REMOTE_FILES)
FOREACH $item_name IN $list
    PRINT($item_name)
END FOREACH
 
# How the list variable looks like?
PRINT($list)

Running the script you get:

index.html
styles.css
the_file.zip
index.html|styles.css|the_file.zip

Of course you can use lists to download files, connect to many servers etc. Sometimes lists are even passed through the command line to the FTP script directly:

# Get the list of servers from the command line
$server_list=GETPARAM(3)
 
# For each server....
FOREACH $server IN $server_list
 
	# Connect
	OPENHOST($server,"my_common_user","my_common_password")
 
	# Retrieve the file listing
	GETLIST($list,REMOTE_FILES)
 
	# For each file in the root directory of the server..
	FOREACH $item_name IN $list
		GETFILE($item_name)
	END FOREACH
END FOREACH

You can call the FTP script from the command line this way:

ScriptFTP.exe the_script.ftp "192.168.1.134|theserver.com|ftp.mysite.net|192.168.2.16"

GETPARAM(3) will retrieve the third parameter which is the list of servers and put it inside the script in the variable $server_list.