Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

CHAPTER 23 MAC OS X AUTOMATION WITH AUTOMATOR AND APPLESCRIPT 407
The Google results page will have a lot of links besides the image results, so you’ll want to
apply a filter. Drag over a Filter URLs action from the Internet group. This uses a rule editor,
similar to the one used in Mail. Again, by experiment, we determined we want links with URLs
that begin with the following:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=
Running the workflow will show 20 URLs, as shown in Figure 23-7. Loading one of these
URLs in Safari, you can see that these don’t lead to the image directly. Rather, they lead to a
multiframe Google results page that requires some clicking to get the image.
Figure 23-7. Filtering URLs in Automator
However, the URLs themselves contain the link to the image. Once again, you will have to
turn to a simple shell script to extract the text you need. Add another Run Shell Script action,
just as before, and enter this script:
for url in $@
do
url=${url##*imgurl=}
url=${url%%&*}
echo $url
done
This script loops through the arguments and extracts the text between imgurl= and &, returning
the image URL.
TIP If you find it confusing having two actions called Run Shell Script, you can rename any
action from its context menu.
To download the image, drag a Download URLs action from the Internet group, as shown
in Figure 23-8. Note that when presented with a list of inputs, rather than a single input,
Automator actions will automatically loop over the list item, eliminating most of the need for
this most common programming control structure.