Finding out what tabs are "looking at" in Safari

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
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#1

For some reason I can’t seem to find, this doesn’t work (and it’s one of many variations). It fails because it fails to close the frontmost tab with the Command-w even though that works from the keyboard.

set theURLs to {}
try
	repeat
		tell application "Safari"
			activate
			set end of theURLs to URL of document 1
			tell document 1
				using terms from application "System Events"
					keystroke w using {command down}
				end using terms from
			end tell
		end tell
	end repeat
on error
	exit repeat
end try
theURLs
#2

This is where Script Editor gets somewhat less than friendly. It requires one to really squint and look at the colors and shapes of the markup it returns to the editor after compile time. In this case your w is being ‘seen’ as a variable as opposed to a string. It needs to be a string to work correctly, so that means quotes:

tell application "System Events" to keystroke "w" using command down

As it happens I recently wrote a little script that saves the open tabs of a Safari window as PDFs. You can find that here:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?p=250292

Since I have a lot of open tabs at the moment that I don’t feel like closing, I repurposed said script a bit so that it gets all the tab URLs first, and then closes the whole window at once. Adjust as necessary:

set theURLs to {}
tell application "Safari"
	activate
	repeat
		set an_url to URL of the front document
		if an_url is not in theURLs then
			set end of theURLs to an_url
			tell application "System Events" to keystroke "}" using command down
		else
			exit repeat
		end if
	end repeat
end tell
tell application "System Events" to keystroke "w" using {shift down, command down}
theURLs
#3

Ahh yes the forgotten quotes, green instead of blue, and didn’t know the command-} key equivalent. Thanks.

Addendum: Just found the Safari Keyboard and Mouse shortcuts, too (I’m normally a Camino user).