Applescript with iCal

Question

Hi All,
I'm trying to write an applescript to dump those events from a calendar that lie between today and a future date I specify. For each event, on a single line I want two tab separated values - the date and the event summary.
Here's what I came up with -
<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #FFEE80;
overflow: auto;"
title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">
#!/usr/bin/osascript
on run argv
set so to ""
tell application "iCal"
set endDate to (AppleScript's date (item 2 of argv))
set curDate to (current date)
set curDate to curDate - (time of curDate)
repeat with e in (every event in calendar (item 1 of argv) ¬
whose (start date) is greater than or equal to curDate ¬
and (start date) is less than or equal to endDate)
if so is not "" then set so to so & "\n"
set so to so & (short date string of AppleScript's date (start date of e)) & "\t" & (summary of e)
end repeat
end tell
end run
</pre>
This works as long as I do not use "short date string of AppleScript's date". However when I try to get the short date string i get this error -
<pre>
[puneet@bluestreak scripts]$ ./iCalEvents.AppleScript personal 4/3
./iCalEvents.AppleScript:444:461: execution error: Can’t make short date string of date (date "Saturday, March 28, 2009 12:00:00 AM") into type Unicode text. (-1700)
</pre>
Can someone point out what am I doing wrong ? (I know AppleScript only since yesterday :P)
thanks in advance,
regards,
Puneet

Answer 1

I'm just guessing, but I'll say that you're being too verbose.
set so to so & (short date string of AppleScript's date (start date of e)) & "\t" & (summary of e)
(start date of e) is already a date object, so there's no need to coerce it to another date object, and there's certainly no need to coerce it to "AppleScript's date".
So I'd suggest:
set so to so & (short date string of (start date of e)) & "\t" & (summary of e)