The macosxhints Forums - Looking for a "add characters" script

It's easy! Just do one step at a time until you're done. Here it is with comments:

Code:

tell application "TextWrangler"  -- Tells Applescript that you want to instruct TextWrangler what to do

        activate  -- Tells TextWrangler to be the active application, as if you'd clicked on its window.

        set x to text of window 1  -- Sets a variable "x" to be all of the text in the active window 

        set mytext to "" -- Initializes mytext to be empty

        set y to every paragraph of x -- Sets variable "y" to be a list of the paragraphs in "x" (paragraphs are separated by returns)

        repeat with eachline in y  -- Sets up a loop where "eachline" takes on each successive value in "y"

                set mytext to mytext & "<location>" & eachline & "</location>" & return & "<title>" & eachline & "</title>" & return

                -- Adds to "mytext" the location and title tags around "eachline" and separates them with carriage return characters

        end repeat -- End of loop is reached when "eachline" has been every item in the list "y"

        set text of window 1 to mytext -- Tells TextWrangler to replace the text in its current window with the text in "mytext"

end tell -- Done with TextWrangler

It's slightly different code because I saw that I was being redundant. See if you can spot where!