Extract URL from Mail message

Paragraphs are delimited by returns, so I am guessing that the URL is on a line all by itself, with no other text. You are setting the someData variable to the paragraphs, but then later use it as a variable in a repeat statement, where it becomes an item of theContent (which is a text string). You can just step through the paragraphs with the repeat statement:

<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #F4A460;
overflow: auto;"
title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">
set theURL to ""
repeat with someData in (get paragraphs of theContent)
if someData begins with "https://" then set theURL to someData
end repeat
if theURL is "" then
-- not found
end if
</pre>

Message was edited by: red_menace

The most obvious problem is how you're trying to iterate through the paragraphs.

You start off with:

set theContent to content of theMessages

which is fine - theContent now contains the text of the email.

You then extract the paragraphs of that text:

set someData to paragraphs of theContent

But you then reset 'someData' to be the iterator in a loop:

repeat with someData in theContent

Additionally, you're iterating through theContent, which is a single block of text.

I think what you mean to do is iterate through the paragraphs of theContent, like:

repeat with someData in (get paragraphs of theContent)

Once you have this, you know someData is the paragraph you're currently looking at so you can:

set theURL to someData

Finally, you do not want an 'else ... set theURL' statement because that will reset theURL every time you find a line that doesn't begin with "https://" (e.g. if paragraph 10 starts with https:// you set theURL to that paragraph, but as soon as you move onto line 11 you reset theURL because the paragraph doesn't begin with https://
To address this you should just iterate through the paragraphs and only set theURL to paragraph 18 if you didn't find any matching lines.

Putting it all together:

set theURL to "" -- default value for theURL
theContent to content of theMessage
repeat with someData in (get paragraphs of theContent)
if someData begins with "http://" then
set theURL to someData
end if
end repeat
if theURL = "" then
try
set theURL to paragraph 18 of theContent
end try
end if

Note that I've included the 'paragraph 18' line in a try block. That's so that the script doesn't fail if there are less than 18 paragraphs in the message (you can't get paragraph 18 of a 17-paragraph document).

Something must be delimiting the line endings - is the content in HTML? If the content is indeed HTML, the script could look for a link tag (if it is a link), otherwise could break the message up using the br tags. If you could post the raw source of some of the content it would help to see what the format is, so that the end of the link could be determined.

Message was edited by: red_menace

Hello

Since 'paragraph 18 of theContent' can return a URL, I'd suspect what you're getting by theURL in the red_menace's script is something like -

item 18 of every paragraph of "..."

instead of -

"https://..."



If that is the case, you're very close to your goal.
Just try something like the following script.
It will return the first paragraph which begins with "https://".

--SCRIPT
set theURL to ""
repeat with p in (get paragraphs of theContent)
set p to p's contents
if p begins with "https://" then
set theURL to p
exit repeat
end if
end repeat
return theURL
--END OF SCRIPT

* The loop variable in this form of repeat statement is a reference to an item in the given list, not an item itself. You may dereference the reference by getting the 'contents' of the reference.

Hope this may help,
H