Applescript: How do I select menu item with Quotes
 

Hi all, I'm new to this forum, but not new to Macs or Programming. Just got my iPhone and was looking to do some automating.

I'm trying to automate the clicking of the File->Sync "Jordan's iPhone" menu item in iTunes. Notice the Quotes around "Jordan's iPhone".

Here's what I have:

The first "set inputStr" is a test, and Full Screen works great with a movie playing. The second "set inputStr" statement is where the problem is. The menu item for Sync on iTunes adds Quotes around the item. Here's the ERROR:

If I do it with out the quotes (Sync Jordan's iPhone). I get the same error:

I've also tried
Anyone have any ideas on how to handle the quotes?

The Method menu_click was provide by jacobolus (maxosxhints), and all works fine.

I have to say, I love it when Apple decides not to play by their own rules. <sigh...>

when I investigated this (and please note that I checked it out with my iPod on the assumption that that would work equivalently to the iPhone), I found that even though the visible menu says Sync "so-and-so's iPod", in fact, the system only sees Sync iPod. you can test this for yourself by inserting the following code in an appropriate place in your script:

or you can buy me an iPhone and I will happily test further.

needless to say, I prefer option 2 :D

tw,

Thanks so much for the response.

I tried just "Sync iPhone" and it didn't work. And I couldn't get the list via the code you sent.

I added your code and got the error:

I included the script to give an idea where I put the code you sent.

sending your script back at you, with revisions (in red)

tw,

That helped a lot. Here's the strange thing ;)

All menu items that have quotes or "..." after them fail. All other menu items work great! ;) Is that nuts or what?

With the same code were you able to click on an item with ... let's say

set inputStr to "iTunes, File, New Smart Playlist..."

Isn't that strange behavior or is there some trick to it?

It might be that the OS menu handler is putting the name into a placeholder, and that the actual menu item text you see is not what the menu description is (I think I got that right), so a matching comparison is failing somewhere.

By the way, you can skip all that assigning to a string and text item delimiter stuff by just directly passing the list items (the handler code is confusing enough):

menu_click({"iTunes", "View", "Full Screen"})

well, I understand the '...' problem. apparently, iTunes is not using three periods, but rather a single charachter called the horizontal ellipsis (it looks like three dots, but it's really a single entity, go figure...). if you can find that character and paste it into your script instead of three dots, that would work.

in case you're curious, this is the character - … - and this is three dots in a row - ... -. hope that comes through in the forum.

also, when I look at the list of menu items that comes out of applescript, there aren't any with quotes in them. you shouldn't have to use quotes anywhere here, apparently.

I also use a constant for the elipse, but I was referring to the original problem. I have seen some string definitions with placeholders like "Do Something %1", and was wondering if something like that was causing the problem, since there are quotes in the menu item, but apparently not in the menu definition.

sorry RM, my response was aimed at the post before yours. I think you're right - there's some kind of variable working in that menu - but I'm not sure what can be done about it except peek in through system events and see the actual menu values. I've actually been trying to figure out whether Apple designers are getting sloppy and inconsistent, or whether they're transitioning slowly into some new structures. I've just been running into a lot of inaccessible features, unscriptable apps, and undocumented effects.

I couldn't figure out how to select a menu item with quotes in it so I scrapped the whole thing and looped through the menu items using the code that "tw" provided. I used an offset to find what I was looking for. By keeping track of the count I was then able to do click menu item (count).

It bugs me that I couldn't figure it out, but I don't know Applescript all that well so alas, resigned to defeat.

Thanks for all of your kind help. This is a terrific board. Much appreciated all of the responses.

Cheers, Jordan

first rule of learning a new computer language - never get frustrated. remember, talking to a computer is worse than talking to a toddler; it's not even trying to meet you halfway, so you have to do all the thinking for both of you. drains the mental batteries... :-)

so, plug in your iPhone, launch iTunes, take a deep iBreath, and run this simplified script - it will do nothing except make a list of iTunes' File menu items in TextEdit. copy that list into your next post here and let us see what we can see.

Here's the output even with the iPhone in the cradle and Sync "Jordan's iPhone" under the File Menu.

I changed the script a little bit and here's the output, this matches what's on the running program with iPhone in cradle:

Where do we go from here? ;)

well faaaaaaascinating. according to this, iTunes treats your iPhone as though it were an iPod. try using "Sync iPod" in your script when your iPhone is plugged in, see if you get the results you expect.

Ah HA! Success is mine!

The reason for the goofiness is that the characters are NOT the standard quotes, but the left and right double quotation marks! (Troubleshooting tip: copy and paste text from the results window to a text editor like BBEdit)

I was unable to get an ascii number for the characters, but you can use Unicode or paste the character from the input menu (Script Editor > Edit > Special Characters…) into a string variable. For Example:

set LeftQuote to "“"
set RightQuote to "”"
menu_click({"iTunes", "File", "Sync " & LeftQuote & "Jordan's iPhone" & RightQuote})

ah, ok, cool. :) incidentally, to play with the ascii, you can use the following commands:

Hmmm - I was using ASCII 201 for the elipse, but the other characters failed for some reason at the time. Seems to be working now though, must be getting late or something...

Sorry to come in so late.
But have you tried


I just tested it and it makes my connected iPod sync.

OMG! ;)

mark_hunte in five minutes you did what I was trying to do in a day and a half. ;)

Modified a little bit, but works just fine:

I did want to be able to distinguish between iPhone and iPod, for example I'm calling the Applescript from another program and wanted to say Update iPhone, and if there was an iPod in the cradle then reply back with "iPhone not available".

Do you know what I mean? In that scenario, I'd need to check the menu items. Do you agree?

So now, looks like I have to go back to Red_Menace's or tw's suggestion of using Left/Right quotes or ascii codes respectively.

btw: tw, I did try "Sync iPod". It didn't match, so iTunes definitely knows there's a difference.

Latest update: Check out this line. (Something happened in the cut and paste, probably encoding from UTF-16 to UTF-8).
In Applescript, the menu items has curly quotes around Jordan's iPhone. Seems to make a difference because the offset says there is NO MATCH.

The first Sync above uses ascii 210 and 211. The second Sync above (from Apple's Menu Item) uses Curly or Paired Quotes. So the offset above does NOT match in applescript. ??

The objective is to select the Menu item by Name. As in:

ASCII 210 and 211 are straight quotes, The iTunes menu has paired or curly quotes. The rational is I want to update/sync a specific device, not any device that happens to be in the cradle. Anyone have any bright ideas?

ugh. you may be running into a current limitation of applescript: it doesn't really handle unicode text well. if the curly quotes are unicode, AS will implicitly translate them to standard ASCII without telling you.

I will say that I remember reading a nice discussion of this on the Satimage website, somewhere, but for the time being you might have to use the cut and paste approach.

as to specifying updates - well, a quick glance at the iTunes AS dictionary shows that the update command has an optional source parameter. don't know the syntax they are looking for, but that should allow you to specify which device you're updating.

The reason your offset doesn't match is that you are using different single quotes. What I did was copy characters from the result of listing the menu items (from Script Editor) and testing/comparing those. I used another application (Mail) that uses the quotes in a menu item, and was able to click on it using the ASCII codes.

Apple sure could have made this easier... lol

The thing is you should not need to enter the name of the menu item in the script, but use what you have to get the script to do it for you.

I do not have a iPhone, but it worked when i used "iPod" in the line:
if SyncItem contains "iPhone" then

Good idea (see, this is why I don't program for a living) - my menu click handler now just looks if the item is contained in one of the menu items. In case anyone is interested, here is the handler:

Red_Menace and Mark Hunte,

Just wanted to follow up with an update. I dropped the project and worked on some other things before Red posted the solution above. Went back to the project today and BINGO!

the code works flawlessly now. I'm so excited I don't know what to do.

Thank everyone for contributing to this post, I'm sure it helps tons of people.

Thanks, Jordan