Replacing words in Applescript - macos

Question

I'm back to writing Applescripts. I'm making a script that will Google things for you. Basically, I need to replace all of the spaces with %20. I know a little about text item delimiters, but I don't know how to implement them in this case.
Here's what I got so far:
if userInput contains "Google " then set {TID, text item delimiters} to {text item delimiters, {"Google "}}
if length of userInput is greater than or equal to 2 then set resultString to text item 2 of userInput
if userInput contains "Google " then set text item delimiters to TID
set openPage to (resultString as string)
if userInput contains "Google " then do shell script "open http://www.google.com/search?q=" & openPage
FYI, the userInput variable is the variable I use when dealing with textboxes.
Thanks

Answer 1

I think this script demonstrates the principle of what you’re trying to do:
tell application "Safari"
activate
display dialog "Search Google for:" default answer "" buttons {"Cancel", "OK"} default button "OK" with title (the name as text) with icon note giving up after 60
if the button returned of the result is equal to "OK" then
set theSearch to the text returned of the result
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to space
set theSearchList to every text item of theSearch
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "+"
set theQuery to theSearchList as text
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
set theLink to "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=" & theQuery & "&btnG=Google+Search"
open location theLink
end if
end tell
However, it’s a lot easier if you just ask an app like BBEdit (or its free version, TextWrangler, which has the same AppleScript dictionary) to do the find and replace for you, because BBEdit is an expert at finding and replacing text, whereas AppleScript by itself is not. AppleScript is a “little language” — it deliberately lacks 95% of the functionality of most programming languages because the functionality is in the apps that you command with AppleScript. In other words, AppleScript expects you to have a text editor with which to process text, therefore AppleScript deliberately doesn’t have the built-in text processing ability of a language like Perl (which you can also use in your AppleScripts.)
So the above script gets a lot shorter, easier to write, easier to read, and easier to understand if you add BBEdit (or the free TextWrangler) into the mix:
tell application "Safari"
activate
display dialog "Search Google for:" default answer "" buttons {"Cancel", "OK"} default button "OK" with title (the name as text) with icon note giving up after 60
if the button returned of the result is equal to "OK" then
set theSearch to the text returned of the result
tell application "BBEdit"
set theQuery to replace " " using "+" searchingString theSearch
end tell
set theLink to "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=" & theQuery & "&btnG=Google+Search"
open location theLink
end if
end tell
Also, notice that you don’t have to run a shell script to open a link in a browser. So this line in your script:
if userInput contains "Google " then do shell script "open http://www.google.com/search?q=" & openPage
… can be written like this:
if userInput contains "Google " then open location "http://www.google.com/search?q=" & openPage
… or like this:
if userInput contains "Google " then
open location "http://www.google.com/search?q=" & openPage
end if
… and you can use the “open location” command with any app, not just Safari. If you tell Finder to “open location” the link will open in your default browser, which might be Chrome.