While trying to make an automator action that opens multiple tabs from selected text as input I ran into an applescript issue I wasn't able to solve for awhile. This includes the answer and I'm posting this here because I just wasn't able to find documentation on how to handle data in "input" for a receives selected "text" in "any application" automator action, everything is for files which comes in as a list already.
When putting an applescript action in, you get:
on run {input, parameters}
the problem here is that input isn't in a list format and trying to do anything with it breaks the script or throws an error. ie I can't do:
repeat with URL in input
set this_URL to URL
So how can I treat a list of selected text as a list of items?
the solution is first treat input as a string then break apart every paragraph.
on run {input, parameters}
set inputText to input as string
set URL_list to every paragraph of inputText
Without treating input "as string" first before doing "every paragraph of" it won't work.
Here's the end working script, replace the "some_url" with your own. You'll be able to select several lines of text in an editor and treat each one as a parameter to your fixed url opening each in a new safari tab. This could be expanded upon by having each line be delimited for multiple params on the url.
on run {input, parameters}
set inputText to input as string
set URL_list to every paragraph of inputText
tell application "Safari"
activate
repeat with URL in URL_list
set this_URL to URL
# extra processing of URL could be done here for multiple params
my new_tab()
set tab_URL to "http://some_url.com?data=" & this_URL
set the URL of document 1 to tab_URL
end repeat
end tell
return input
end run
on new_tab()
tell application "Safari" to activate
tell application "System Events"
tell process "Safari"
click menu item "New Tab" of ¬
menu "File" of menu bar 1
end tell
end tell
end new_tab
As an example say you had the list and had a service of the above using "http://stackoverflow.com/posts/" & this_URL
6318162
6318163
6318164
you could now select them click services and choose your "StackOverflow - view questions" service and it'll append and open each one in a new safari tab. In my case I needed to verify multiple dns entries in our server as still valid and do a bunch of whois lookups.