A common task is to get the paths to items currently selected in the Finder. The simplest approach, which converts each Finder reference to text in a repeat loop, can be noticeably slow for a large number of selected items:
-- Method #1:
set hfsPaths to {}
tell application "Finder"
repeat with currItem in (get selection)
set end of hfsPaths to currItem as text
end repeat
end tell
A common way to improve efficiency is with the as alias list construct, which executes about 4 to 5 times faster.
-- Method #2:
set hfsPaths to {}
tell application "Finder"
repeat with currItem in (get selection as alias list)
set end of hfsPaths to currItem as text
end repeat
end tell
A third approach entails bulk conversion of the selection to text and extraction of the paths using text item delimiters. On my machine, Method #3 runs about 10 times faster than Method #1 and about 2.5 times faster than Method #2 and thus may be the preferred approach when processing a large number of items:
-- Method #3
set {tid, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, return}
tell application "Finder" to set hfsPaths to (selection as text)'s paragraphs
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to tid
The text item delimiter approach has been described by ccstone before (http://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?pid=164036), but I thought it would be worthwhile pointing it out in a more widely viewed forum because of the frequency with which this task is performed.
