Need AppleScript (and probably JavaScript) help

Couldn't you go directly to the hyperlink? Instead of going to the website. In Safari, if you hover your mouse over at hyperlink, then the web address will be displayed at the very bottom left of the window.

Script:

tell application "Safari"

make new document with properties {URL:" https://www.google.com"}

end tell

te

I think this will do what you want. (Assumes you have loaded the signed out page as you describe in the frontmost document):

tellapplication "Safari"

setlinkCountto (do JavaScript "document.links.length" indocument 1)

repeatwithlinkNofrom 0 to (linkCount - 1)

settheLinkto (do JavaScript "document.links[" & linkNo & "].href" indocument 1)

iftheLinkcontains "AccountChooser" then

setURLofdocument 1 totheLink

exitrepeat

endif

endrepeat

endtell

Do you have to do this in Safari? This sounds like something for a Python script. It is very popular for this kind of automated interaction. The web server doesn't know there isn't a browser running.

Well, I attempted to post a Python script here that finds the account-chooser-link class, and then prints the adjacent href link contents. Using the advanced editor, and two different (plain, Python) syntax highlighting templates resulted in the red banner blocked from posting the code. Thought police prevail.

The business end of this script was nine lines of code, though 36 lines in total to make it auto-adapt from Python 2.7.5 through 3.4.3, and perform error handling.

It is probably the updated spam filters, not thought police. They had to dramatically increase it at the last spam flood.

Although I haven't used them, I have heard that there are libraries in Python that will act just like a browser, complete with asynchronous Javascript. Are you using one of those here?

I am using standard Python libraries in my example that can be used to retrieve info from websites, or transmit data back to CGI backends. Wanted to keep it as simple as possible without using add on modules.

There are Python web frameworks (Django, Flask, Bottle, Pyramid, etc.) that you may be thinking about. It is possible to combine Django with Asynchronous JavaScript for a client-server web solution. More on Python web frameworks.

I trimmed the Python code down to its essentials and below is how you would use it in an AppleScript. You would replace the search url in the examplewith the path to the website you want to scrape for account-chooser-link. The AppleScript function containing the Python code will return either one or more instances of the href link associated with the provided site, or the ‘None’ string because the search string was not found, or there were errors.

set myURL to "http://localhost/~user" as text

set hrefList to gethrefbyid(myURL)

if hrefList does not contain "None" then log (hrefList as text)

return

on gethrefbyid(aURL)

return do shell script "python <<'EOF' - " & aURL & "

from urllib2 import Request, urlopen, URLError, HTTPError

import re

import sys

this_url = \"\".join(sys.argv[1:]).decode('utf-8')

def main():

try:

req = Request(this_url)

website = urlopen(req)

page = website.read().decode('utf-8')

found = re.findall('account-chooser-link.+?href=\"(.+?)\"', page)

for href in found:

print(''.join(href))

except (URLError, HTTPError) as e:

print('None')

if __name__ == '__main__':

sys.exit(main())

'EOF'"

end gethrefbyid