Does AppleScript have a replace function?

Question

In VBA, its extrememly easy to replace substrings with a different substring, an example being objMsg.Body = Replace(objMsg.Body, "<Month\", Format(dtDate1, "mmmm")) which replaces "<Month>" with the current month in a email body. I've seen questions similar to this before, but they are a couple years old and tend to have insane workarounds that are almost not even worth my time.

Answer 1

No, but you can use this one (source):

on replace_chars(this_text, search_string, replacement_string)
 set AppleScript's text item delimiters to the search_string
 set the item_list to every text item of this_text
 set AppleScript's text item delimiters to the replacement_string
 set this_text to the item_list as string
 set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
 return this_text
end replace_chars

usage:

replace_chars(message_string, "string_to_be_replaced", "replacement_string")

(btw, you can nowadays also use JavaScript instead of AppleScript, search for "JavaScript for OS X Automation")

Answer 2

One really simple way to do find/replace is to call a shell script and pass text into it as a string:

set inputText to "My name is Fred."
set findText to "Fred"
set replaceText to "Sally"

set newText to do shell script "sed 's|" & quoted form of findText & "|" & quoted form of replaceText & "|g' <<< " & quoted form of inputText