Current profile length

aseidl · Post by **aseidl** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 1:25 am

How hard would it be to put a counter somewhere in the Personal/Profile prefs that shows the current length of the profile? When I am bored enough to change my profile, I usually go a little overboard and end up with more than 1024 bytes (for AIM). In order to cut the profile down to the right size with what I want, I end up constantly closing and reopening the prefs to see how much more I need to cut out.

Also, I discovered that smart quotes copied from Safari take up a lot more space in the profile than regular double quotes ". (I use smart quotes for a little something I set up that shows the lyrics to the current song in iTunes) I'm guessing this is because Adium has to use a different character encoding or something to use the smart quotes.

Lyg · Post by **Lyg** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 1:48 am

I would love this to be a toolbar option for the IM windows (with live updating). This way, if I paste a document, Adium would tell me how many characters over I am or how many characters I have left before AIM's cap.

Post by **jstamos** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 2:53 am

The problem with this is that the formatting HTML or other code used to make the colours and fonts of your profile appear on other computers take up additional room and aren't added until a message is sent.

Post by **bgannin** » Thu Feb 03, 2005 3:33 am

It would be very hard. I was going to do this a long time ago and didn't, for exactly the reasons jstamos listed. The 'conversion' occurs when sent and would have to be done for each character added, each change in formatting, etc. and then counted (both formatting and actual message)

Bosk · Post by **Bosk** » Sun Feb 06, 2005 2:28 am

is there any way to discover how many bytes it turns out to be when the profile is actually sent to the server? if so you could have a little "busy" indicator appear when you save the profile, and then if it exceeds the size pop down a sheet:

"Your profile data has exceeded the allotted size

[ revert to old profile ] [ edit ] [ truncate ]"

or some such. i have absolutely no idea if this is feasible, but it would be kinda nice.

BlueRevolution · Post by **BlueRevolution** » Sun Feb 06, 2005 2:46 am

would a script that counts the length of a string work? like this:

Code: Select all

on substitute(profile)
	tell application "GrowlHelperApp" to notify with title "Length of Profile" description (length of profile) as text
	return profile
end substitute

then you could plug in whatever you want, say:

%profilecount{My profile

the only thing the bowl of peteunias thought was "oh no, not again", and if we knew why it thought that we'd know far more about the universe than we do now.}

and other people would only see what is in the braces. obviously a more complicated would be in order to do what you're describing, but that general concept.