Calling AppleScript from Python

In my work I frequently have cause to call AppleScript from one language or vice versa.

I’ve tried various methods to call AppleScript from Python and they all work to some extent, but I recent sumbled across Dr. Drang’s method. This is ridiculously simple and works for about roughly 90% of everything I need it for.

It’s pretty simple. Basically, you just call osascript with the subprocess module, but it uses stdin and stdout to pass the AppleScript to and from osascript for you. This neatly takes care of most of your polyglot problems. If you need to embed a value in an AppleScript string, there’s a convenient asquote Python function to safely embed a Python string inside AppleScript. This takes care of most of the remaining polyglot problems.

import subprocess

def asrun(ascript):
    "Run the given AppleScript and return the standard output and error."
    osa = subprocess.Popen(['osascript', '-'],
                         stdin=subprocess.PIPE,
                         stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    return osa.communicate(ascript)[0]

def asquote(astr):
    "Return the AppleScript equivalent of the given string."
    astr = astr.replace('"', '" & quote & "')
    return '"{}"'.format(astr)

I like it.