At my company the sysadmins provide a little service when putting all phone numbers of colleagues on my cell phone. Every colleague is prefixed with a dot. My car’s carkit though lists all numbers grouped by alphabet. So this leads to like a couple hundred entries grouped under a single dot. Fortunatly I can sync my phone to my Apple’s Address Book. When it’s in there, the following little AppleScript allows me to change all first names starting with a dot to something without a dot.

First I transfer all dot-prefixed entries to a special group, then this script runs the people in that group through a little check and adjustment when needed.

(The syntax of AppleScript is a real pain.)

on lstripString(theText, trimString)
	set x to count trimString
	try
		repeat while theText begins with the trimString
			set theText to characters (x + 1) thru -1 of theText as text
		end repeat
	on error
		return ""
	end try
	return theText
end lstripString

tell application "Address Book"
	set infoSupporters to people of group "InfoSupport"
	repeat with p in infoSupporters
		if first name of p starts with "." then
			set new_first_name to my lstripString(first name of p, ".")
			set first name of p to new_first_name
		end if
	end repeat

	display dialog "Done!"
end tell