How do you loop through disparate control-selected cells? - google-apps-script

Question

I am writing a script that would normalize the selected phone numbers in a Google spreadsheet:
/**
* Normalizes phone numbers to ###-###-#### format.
*/
function normalizePhoneNumbers() {
var activeSheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
var activeRange = activeSheet.getActiveRange();
var selectedCells = activeRange.getValues();
var phoneNumber = "";
for (var i = 0; i < selectedCells.length; i++) {
for (var j = 0; j < selectedCells[i].length; j++) {
phoneNumber = selectedCells[i][j]; // for better readability
if (phoneNumber) {
phoneNumber = phoneNumber.replace(/[^\d]/g, ""); // remove all non-digit characters from phone number
} else {
continue;
}
if (phoneNumber.length === 10) {
phoneNumber = phoneNumber.slice(0, 3) + '-' + phoneNumber.slice(3, 6) + '-' + phoneNumber.slice(6, 10);
} else {
continue;
}
selectedCells[i][j] = phoneNumber;
}
}
activeRange.setValues(selectedCells);
};
This works when I select a row or a column or a block of cells, but only changes one of the items if I control-select cells scattered around the spreadsheet. Is it possible to change multiple cells in a non-contiguous selection? If so, what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

What you want to do is not exactly possible. For instance, activerange.setValues() expects a single 2D array (like what's returned by Range.getValues()). In either case your function could only get a single rectangular array of data, not a disjoint set of cells, hen you call getValues().
However, if you can deal with making this a custom function which is invoked within a spreadsheet (using something like =NORMALIZEPHONENUMBERS) then you can use map() as demonstrated under Optimization in the custom functions documentation.