Scripting Safari URLs Update

Friday, 31 January 2003

Two updates on “Scripting Safari URLs”.

Open Location

Previously, I complained about Safari’s lack of support for any of the standard browser commands for opening a URL (such as GetURL or OpenURL). The best workaround I could come up with, and which I’ve seen elsewhere, is something like this:

tell application "Safari"
    make new document at end of documents
    set url of document 1 to "http://www.example.com/"
end tell

I figured there had to be a better way. Safari is obviously capable of opening web pages via Apple events. For example, if you have Safari set as your default web browser, it responds to Apple events from your email client when you click links in messages, and it opens web pages when you double-click web location clipping files in the Finder. Those are Apple events, and there’s no way those applications are sending complicated Apple events to Safari — they’re sending an open URL event.

Jim Correia provided the solution via email. Although Safari doesn’t have an entry in its dictionary for the standard GetURL Apple event, it is defined in the Standard Additions OSAX as open location. So, to open a URL in Safari, you can simply use:

tell application "Safari"
    open location "http://www.example.com"
end tell

Much nicer, no?

Insert URL from Safari

Bill Hoffman wrote to ask why our script to insert a URL from Safari into BBEdit used this:

set url_list to {}

tell application "Safari"
    set doc_list to every document
    repeat with d in doc_list
        copy URL of d to end of url_list
    end repeat
end tell 

to build a list of Safari’s open URLs, instead of this:

tell application "Safari"
    set url_list to URL of every document
end tell

No reason, except that I didn’t think of it. Hoffman’s code is shorter and more direct. We’ve revised the script in last week’s article accordingly.