Does Alfred interpret pbpaste differently?

[bvp663]

I've been trying to tackle a workflow but I keep running into an issue with how Alfred is handling clipboard contents.

 

The Workflow

The workflow is designed to take content copied from a spreadsheet (two columns, multiple rows) and injest data from both columns into a url in Chrome.

1234	5678
9101112	13141516

The script is designed to inject the items into a url, for example https://mywebsit.com/{field1}/blahblah/{field2}

 

Here's the script:

CLIPBOARD=$(pbpaste -Prefer txt)
while read LINE ; do

FIELD1=$(echo $LINE | cut -d ' ' -f 1)
FIELD2=$(echo $LINE | cut -d ' ' -f 2)

open -a "/Applications/Google Chrome.app" "https://mywebsite.com/${FIELD1}/blahblahblah/${FIELD2}/"
open -a "/Applications/Google Chrome.app" "https://mywebsite.com/${FIELD1}/beepboop/${FIELD2}"


done < <(echo $query)

 

I got it working, but it will only open tabs for the first row and won't run through any additional rows. From what I can tell, this seems to be Alfred's fault in how it handles clipboard contents. If I run `pbaste` in Terminal the clipboard contents show up in columns and rows as expected. However if I tell Alfred to send to LOGGER how it's reading clipboard contents, they all show up in a single line.

 

e.g. When I run pbpaste in Terminal:

1234	5678
9101112	13141516

e.g. How Alfred interprets pbpaste in the script:

1234  5678 9101112 13141516

 

Is there anything I'm missing here? Is this a known issue with Alfred or is there a different way to approach the problem?

[deanishe]

The script doesn't make sense.

 

CLIPBOARD=$(pbpaste -Prefer txt)

 

but 

 

done < <(echo $query)

 

Where does $query come from?

 

Should that line read done <<(echo $CLIPBOARD)?

 

Alfred doesn't "interpret" your scripts in any way. It passes them straight to whichever program you've specified to run them (with the single exception of replacing {query} if you have it set up that way).

 

However, it's important to remember that Alfred doesn't use your shell environment. In particular, if you call, say, python expecting that to be /usr/local/bin/python, your script may not work because /usr/local/bin isn't in PATH in Alfred (or any Mac application). You'll get /usr/bin/python instead.

Edited November 28, 2016 by deanishe

[vitor]

Don’t echo or cat to pipes or use <(echo. There are easier and more correct ways:

cat "{{input_file}}" | command
# can be expressed as
command < "{{input_file}}"

echo "{{input_text}}" | command
# can be expressed as
command <<< "{{input_text}}"

And why save CLIPBOARD, even? I wouldn’t be surprised if bash itself was mangling the multi-line variable. You can scrape CLIPBOARD and just:

while
…
done < $(pbpaste)

Edited November 28, 2016 by vitor