Look Up PHP Reference from BBEdit

Many years ago I was trying to learn AppleScript and just not getting it. Nothing against AppleScript—everybody’s brain is wired differently. For me, a language that seems like natural language but really isn’t was just confusing.

But that’s just me. While struggling with AppleScript I discovered Frontier, and it immediately clicked for me.

Since then I’ve learned lots of other languages, but AppleScript has always been the language that stumps me. Which is why I’m proud to have finally written a useful AppleScript script.

The following is a script for BBEdit. If you write PHP scripts in BBEdit it’s useful.

This script allows you to select some text then search for it on the PHP site. Drop it in your Scripts folder as a compiled script. On my machine I called it Look Up PHP Function. Here’s the source:

set s to ""
set searchurl to "http://www.php.net/manual-lookup.php?pattern="

tell application "BBEdit 6.5"
   set s to selection of text window 1 as text
end tell

set searchurl to searchurl & s

tell application "Internet Explorer"
   Activate
   OpenURL searchurl
end tell

It’s pretty simple—it creates a URL by appending the selected text to a base URL. Then it tells Internet Explorer to open that URL. You could probably change the Web browser and it would still work.