Getting line by line in Apple Script from Address Books Note Field - applescript

Question

I have two lines in my address book's note field
Test 1
Test 2
I would like to get each line as a separate value or get the last line from the notes field.
I tried doing it this way:
tell application "Address Book"
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "space"
get the note of person in group "Test Group"
end tell
but the result is
{"Test 1
Test 2"}
I'm looking for :
{"Test1","Test2"}
What am I doing incorrect?

Answer 1

There are a few things wrong with your code. First, you never actually ask for the text items of the note :-) You just get the raw string. The second is that set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "space" sets the text item delimiters to the literal string space. Thus, for instance, running
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "space"
return text items of "THISspaceISspaceAspaceSTRING"
returns
{"THIS", "IS", "A", "STRING"}
Secondly, even if you had " " instead of "space", this would split your string on spaces, and not newlines. For instance, running
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to " "
return text items of "This is a string
which is on two lines."
returns
{"This", "is", "a", "string
which", "is", "on", "two", "lines."}
As you can see, "string\nwhich" is a single list item.
To do what you want, you can just use paragraphs of STRING; for instance, running
return paragraphs of "This is a string
which is on two lines."
returns the desired
{"This is a string", "which is on two lines."}
Now, I'm not entirely clear on exactly what you want to do. If you want to get this for a specific person, you can write
tell application "Address Book"
set n to the note of the first person whose name is "Antal S-Z"
return paragraphs of n
end tell
You have to split it into two statements because, I think, paragraphs of ... is a command, whereas everything on the first line is a property access. (I usually discover these things via trial and error, to be honest.)
If, on the other hand, you want to get this list for every person in a group, it's slightly harder. One big problem is that people without a note get missing value for their note, which isn't a string. If you want to ignore these people, then the following loop will work
tell application "Address Book"
set ns to {}
repeat with p in ¬
(every person in group "Test Group" whose note is not missing value)
set ns to ns & {paragraphs of (note of p as string)}
end repeat
return ns
end tell
The every person ... bit does exactly what it says, getting the relevant people; we then extract their note's paragraphs (after reminding AppleScript that the note of p really is a string). After this, ns will contain something like {{"Test 1", "Test 2"}, {"Test 3", "Test 4"}}.