Question

I’m very new to python and applescript. I have a python script which is calling 2 applescripts. I would like to define few global variables in python and pass to applescript 1 , those values will be modified by different functions in applescripts 1, and pass back to python scripts, then pass those values to applescript 2 to use.

I have googled a bit and I tried the following:

in applescript,

on run argv 
    if (item 1 of argv is start with "x") then 
      function1(item1 of argv)
    else 
      function2 (item 1 of argv)
      function3 (item 2 of argv)
 end run

 on function1 (var)
  set var to (something code to get value from interaction with user)
 return var 
 end function1

in python script
import os
import sys

os.system ('osascript Setup.scpt')
variable1 = sys.argv[1]
variable2 = sys.argv[2]

in the applescript2, i did similar thing as applescirpt1.

However, this didn’t work. I tried to print out all the argv in both scripts, looks like the values are not correctly passed. Can anyone give me more direction on this? Thanks!

Answer 1

os.system(): Execute the command (a string) in a subshell. This is implemented by calling the Standard C function system(), and has the same limitations.

Changes to sys.stdin, sys.stout are not reflected in the environment of the executed command.
The return value is the exit status, not the osascript output.

Use subprocess.Popen:

import os, sys, commands
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

var1 = sys.argv[1] 
var2 = sys.argv[2] 
(var3, tError) = Popen(['osascript', '/Setup.scpt', var1, var2], stdout=PIPE).communicate()
print var1
print var2
print var3

The osascript command always returns a string.
if the AppleScript return a list, the string in python will be separated by a comma and a space.