How to replace a paragraph found by a whose query?

[Bruce Horrocks]

I recently came across some late 1980's vintage HP LaserJet spool files
which have PCL1 escape sequences embedded in them. The codes are
relatively simple - underline etc - so I thought it would be simple
enough to open them as text files in Pages and use an AppleScript to
reformat them as Pages documents (using a fixed width font to maintain
the old-style look etc).

In the original files, a typical header and first line of following text
looks like:

<ESC>&dDIntroduction<ESC>&d@
This is the introduction...

where <ESC>&dD turns on underlining and <ESC>&d@ turns it off again.

Pages strips the escape characters when loading the file so the content
in Pages becomes:

&dDIntroduction&d@
This is the introduction...

Every line ends with a cr+lf which Pages converts into paragraph markers
so each paragraph is a single line / each single line is a Pages paragraph.

The following AppleScript finds the correct header lines and the 'set
temp...' line correctly obtains the heading text minus the printer
control codes at the beginning and end.


tell application "Pages"
tell front document
tell body text
repeat with p in (every paragraph where it starts with "&dD")
set temp to (characters 4 thru -4 of p) as text
set p to temp -- does nothing!
end repeat
end tell
end tell
end tell


What I can't get to work is the "set p to temp" line which fails
silently - nothing changes in Pages but ScriptEditor reports no error.
If it's not obvious, what I want to do is replace the line with the
trimmed line so as to remove the PCL codes from the beginning and end.

All the examples I can find on the Web seem to iterate through all the
paragraphs numerically so there is always an explicit paragraph number
to use. I can't seem to find an example of how to reference paragraphs
returned by a 'whose' filter.

Version info: MacOS Ventura 13.4.1

--
Bruce Horrocks
Surrey, England