Applescript in Automator - Loops and Variables

there are a couple of different ways of doing this, depending on the specifics, but keep in mind that they are all sort of hacks. Automator's really not designed with that kind of looping in mind. but you can do the following: create a storage variable called V, and use the following actions

Get Value of Variable (V)

Run Applescript

on run {input, parameters}

return input + 1

end run

Set Value of Variable (V)

Loop

the variable V will automatically be initialized to 0, and will increment its way up with each repetition of the loop

what are you trying to do (big picture)?

well, there are two approaches to this. If you want to use automator, don't bother with a loop - use Get Spcified URLs followed by Get Text From Webpage: that will produce a list of the text from each webpage you include, and you can use a Run Applescript action to process the list. If you want to use Applescript, then you can either open the websites in Safari and extract their source (Safari scripting dictionary has a 'source' property for documents), or you'd run curl in unix to get the webpage source. I think the first is probably easier, unless there's something tricky you need to do with the applescript.

well, it's easy enough to wrap a one-shot applescript in a repeat loop, but...

the Get Text From Webpage action is not a script - it's a small cocoa plugin for automator. There's no direct way to get webpages from applescript. normally you use applescript to fetch them in Safari and then read the source from there. however, if you want to do it directly you can use the following:

set webpageText to do shell script "curl http://www.weppage.com"

All together it would look something like:

set webList to {"http://www.weppage1.com", "http://www.weppage2.com", "http://www.weppage3.com"}

repeat with thisURL in webList

set webpageText to do shell script "curl " & thisURL

--process webpageText

end repeat

Hi,

I am looking to do something similar. That is to replace a variable called V (that is in a Word document) with the values of 1 to n, increasing by 1 every loop.

For example, i have the following text:

- V text....

- V text....

- V text....

- V text....

- V text....

I want the V to be replaced with 1, 2, 3, ......

Could anybody help??

Thank in advance.