A Mail.app plugin for Sublime Text 3

I wrote my first plugin for Sublime Text. It is quite simple. It takes the text of the current document and turns it into a new Mail.app message. The first line of text is used as the subject line.

Originally I wanted it to use converted markdown text, but Mail’s AppleScript interface has no proper API for HTML messages.¹

To implement AppleScript in my plugin I used Dr. Drang’s Code for combining Python and AppleScript:

#!/usr/bin/python

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)

But that code doesn’t work with Sublime Text 3. Sublime Text 3 uses Python version 3.3. Since Python 3, quite a lot has changed, especially in the treatment of Unicode text.

After some searching I found the small change I needed to make the code work:

The line

return osa.communicate(ascript)[0]

needs to be changed to

return osa.communicate(ascript.encode())[0]

That is because Python 3 internally transforms any text into binary data. If you want to output Unicode again, you first have to reencode it with .encode().

Maybe this will be helpful to somebody else.