Retrieving birthday's with Automater

[SilentPanda]

So I figured I would finally delve into Automater a bit because hey it's on my computer and maybe it will make things easier. So I decided a good task would be to get a list of birthdays for the month. Here is my workflow and the output text... which... makes no sense. Any ideas? My system language isn't set to whatever Asian language is put in the text file.

I have birthdays in my address book which then show up in iCal.

 

[Butler Trumpet]

Yep... thats pretty weird....
Ill see if I can get mine to do that.

 

[gauchogolfer]

I've basically copied your workflow, except I changed 'find events' to 'find calendars'







Here's what my output looks like:





If I use it for a calendar that has data for this month, i.e. work stuff, it works fine.



I hope this works for you as well. I'm not sure what caused your strange Asian text.

 

[SilentPanda]

I copied your workflow to the letter and got the following.... odd.

 

[gauchogolfer]

I copied your workflow to the letter and got the following.... odd.

I'm guessing you used TextEdit to generate the text file? Does it do the same thing with other calendars in iCal?

 

[SilentPanda]

It does the same with other Calendars (if I try to pull up appointments). I also tried messing around with the International settings but no luck. It's not a *huge* deal as I was just doing it to learn some Automater stuff in case I'm ever asked about it... so it's not like it's something I "need". It's just really odd.

Edit: I've thrown a "view results" box between everything... it seems to get the correct results (except for from Birthdays) but no matter what it displays in the Asian font/language. I made a slightly new workflow but it's the same thing... however it doesn't return any events if I select the Birthdays calendar even though I have a few this month.

 

[zv470]

I got it to work like this:

 

[zv470]

p.s. I don't think it's using an Asian Font at all... I think it's Unicode.

 

[SilentPanda]

zv470 I tried your way too and still I get Unicode or whatever... I am a sad panda.

 

[blodwyn]

zv470 I tried your way too and still I get Unicode or whatever... I am a sad panda.

It's obviously happening in the TextEdit step, so dunno if this will work, but in your TextEdit preferences there are options that might help - specifically the 'Format' option on the New Document tab, and maybe the 'HTML Saving Option' on the Open and Save tab.

 

[ManchesterTrix]

Interestingly, if I used New TextEdit Document instead of New Text file, it creates a text edit document that's perfectly readable. New Text File is also giving me the same problem's you're having. I've noticed that Automator is very buggy, but then my only use for it is to make a wrapper for Shell scripts.