Pass Multiple Applescript Variables to Ruby - ruby

Question

I'm working on a Ruby script that requires some variables from Applescript. Right now I'm having success grabbing them one at a time, but it seems inelegant and possibly slow. For example:
note = %x{ osascript <<APPLESCRIPT
tell application "Evernote"
if selection is not {} then
set the_selection to selection
if notebook of item 1 of the_selection is (notebook named "Writing") then
return HTML content of item 1 of the_selection
end if
else
return ""
end if
end tell
APPLESCRIPT}
title = %x{ osascript <<APPLESCRIPT
tell application "Evernote"
if selection is not {} then
set the_selection to selection
if notebook of item 1 of the_selection is (notebook named "Writing") then
return title of item 1 of the_selection
end if
else
return ""
end if
end tell
APPLESCRIPT}
I know I'm probably overlooking something obvious, but is there an easy way I can do this with just a single snippet of Applescript that returns both variables into Ruby (note, title)?

Answer 1

Getting multiple values out of AppleScript is the easy part. Instead of returning a single value, return a list:
result = %x{ osascript <<APPLESCRIPT
tell application "Evernote"
if selection is not {} then
set the_selection to selection
if notebook of item 1 of the_selection is (notebook named "Writing") then
set title to title of item 1 of the_selection
set html to HTML content of item 1 of the_selection
return { title, html }
end if
else
return ""
end if
end tell
APPLESCRIPT}
The hard part is parsing the output. Supposing your title is This is a note and html is <h1>Hello World</h1>, osascript will return this:
This is a note, <h1>Hello World</h1>
You could split it on the , but if title happens to contain a comma, you've got a problem. You can also pass the -ss option to osascript, which makes it return formatted AppleScript objects, but you don't want to have to write your own AppleScript parser in Ruby.
An alternative, if you know title will never contain a line break, is to put a line break after the title:
result = %x{ osascript <<APPLESCRIPT
...
if notebook of item 1 of the_selection is (notebook named "Writing") then
set title to title of item 1 of the_selection
set html to HTML content of item 1 of the_selection
return title & "\n" & html
end if
...
APPLESCRIPT}.chomp
Now the output (result) will look like this:
This is a note
<h1>Hello World</h1>
...and you can get the title and HTML like this:
title, html = result.split("\n", 2)
puts title
# => This is a note
puts html
# => <h1>Hello World</h1>
Now, if you have line breaks in any of your titles (I can't remember if Evernote allows that or not), or if you want to return more than two values, this will be problematic as well. The next simplest solution would be to choose some kind of delimiter that's unlikely to appear in any part of the output, for example %!%:
DELIMITER = '%!%'
result = %x{ osascript <<APPLESCRIPT
...
if notebook of item 1 of the_selection is (notebook named "Writing") then
set title to title of item 1 of the_selection
set html to HTML content of item 1 of the_selection
return title & "#{DELIMITER}" & html
end if
...
APPLESCRIPT}.chomp
# =>This is a note%!%<h1>Hello World</h1>
title, html = result.split(DELIMITER, 2)
If all else fails, you could use an addon to make osascript output a known format that Ruby knows how to parse. Just now I found this free JSON Helper that looks pretty handy.