Question

I’m building an Automator workflow that parses a Dropbox “gallery” page containing Quicktime video files, and automatically builds “direct-download” links for each of the files. In the end, I want all the links to be generated into the body of a Mail.app message.

Basically, everything works as expected, except for the part where the new links are sent to a new Mail.app message. My problem is that the links are sent to the body of the message without newlines, so they all get concatenated into a single line, like this:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/149705/stackexchange/20121209/stackexchange_automator_prob2.png

(Mail.app seems to be wrapping the concatenated string on the question-marks)

The oddest thing about this is that if I use a “Copy to Clipboard” action at the end of the workflow (instead of my send-to-Mail Applescript), I get totally different results when I paste the same clipboard contents into TextEdit vs. BBEdit.

The links seem to paste into TextEdit properly. However, the same clipboard, pasted into a plaintext BBEdit document, yields only the first link:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/149705/stackexchange/20121209/stackexchange_automator_prob5.jpg

What could be causing these 3 entirely different behaviors from the exact same results of the “Get Link URLs” action?

Answer 1

The reason you get that result is it the links start out as a List of strings but are being sent to mail.app as a single string.

You do not need to do anything fancy to fix this just put a return after the link.

I would just use this a single ‘Run applescript’ Action to do the whole job.

The script gathers only the file DL links. Adds a return on the end and send them to Mail.app.
No other formatting required

    on run {input, parameters}

        set db_tag to "dl-web.dropbox.com/get"
        set myLinks to {}
        tell application "Safari"


            set thelinkCount to do JavaScript "document.links.length " in document 1
            repeat with i from 1 to thelinkCount

                set this_link to (do JavaScript "document.links[" & i & "].href" in document 1) as string

                if this_link contains db_tag then

--add the link with a carriage return on the end.

                    copy this_link & return to end of myLinks
                end if
            end repeat
        end tell


        tell application "Mail"
            activate
            make new outgoing message with properties {visible:true, content:"" & myLinks}
        end tell
    end run