AppleScript - help for a complete novice

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Level 1

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AppleScript - help for a complete novice

I have used one of the Applescript examples to create an email and modified this so that it fills in the theAddress, theSubject and the first part of theBody automatically. I would now like to be able to add additional blocks/paragraphs of text to theBody using a dialog box from which I could pick a number of blocks of text from 1 to say 20. I have these blocks of text in a TextEdit file and I assume these blocks need to be identified/named in some way using AppleScript so that a list can be created and put into a Dialog box.

I have no programming experience and have looked at the AppleScript Language guide but I still am unable to work out how to do this.

Can someone help me with this?

iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Posted on Mar 1, 2016 5:25 AM

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Answer 1

SGIII

Level 8

37,604 points

Mar 2, 2016 3:58 PM in response to jashook

jashook wrote:

I could pick a number of blocks of text from 1 to say 20. I have these blocks of text in a TextEdit file and I assume these blocks need to be identified/named in some way using AppleScript so that a list can be created and put into a Dialog box.

If you mark your blocks like this (a label followed by a colon):

Then code like below will you could display a list that looks like this (command-click for multiple selections):

With this result:

SG

tell application "Finder"

set f to (choose file) as alias

set p to (read f as «class utf8»)'s paragraphs

set b to choose from listpwith prompt "Choose 1 or more blocks:" with multiple selections allowed

if result is false then return

end tell

set myBlocks to ""

repeat with i in b's items

set myBlocks to myBlocks & (i as text)'s text ((offset of ":" in (i as text)) + 2) thru -1 & return

end repeat

return myBlocks

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Answer 2

jashook Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 9, 2016 3:03 AM in response to SGIII

Thank you very much for your help. Your example didn't quite work on my system. I was able to select the TEXT file but the dialog box did not return a list but the Block text buried within other characters. So I tried putting the the text into the script (see below) and that worked perfectly (probably not the most elegant solution).

seta

set a to "Alpha1: First sentence of required text. Second sentence."

set b to "Beta2: First sentence of required text. Second sentence."

setcto "Delta3: First sentence of required text. Second sentence."

setpto {a, b, c}

set b to choose from listpwith prompt "Choose 1 or more blocks:" with multiple selections allowed

if result is false then return

set myBlocks to ""

repeat with i in b's items

set myBlocks to myBlocks & (i as text)'s text ((offset of ":" in (i as text)) + 2) thru -1 & return

end repeat

return myBlocks

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