Reading XML data from .pages file

Question

Hi All!
I've been trying to get a script up and running, but frankly I'm lost. The script should read the date, lesson no, and name fields from a .pages file and then use that information to send an e-mail.
What I'm having a problem with is reading the data from the .pages file and I don't know what the best way to do it is because I'm still a novice at this.
So there are two ways I can think of:
1. Read directly from the Pages document when it is open. The problem with this is that it's a Pages template and it contains tables. Perhaps the easiest thing would be just to select certain cells directly from pages, but I have no idea how they're labeled or how to access them so I came up with a second idea. If you happen to know how to do this, I would greatly appreciate it.
2. Pages documents can be unzipped and one of the files is an xml file with a lot of tags and the data I need. I found the following post that talks about how to parse XML via an XSL stylesheet. After going through some tutorials, I got stuck because the xml itself in the Pages file is just a mess to me and I'm confused about which node to choose. In other xml docs you can see a clear, nicely laid out tabbed structure so you can at least figure out the path to the node you want. I stumbled across a nice script for TextWrangler which cleans up XML, but it just barks at the Pages file.
3. On top of that, I will need to use the name field and match that with an Address Book e-mail address. Should I change the template and make it into an address book field?
Thanks in advance,
Paul

Answer 1

The script should read the date, lesson no, and name fields from a .pages file and then use that information to send an e-mail.
Maybe you might want to try the following script:
tell application "Pages"
    activate
    tell foreground layer of page 1 of front document
        select (text box 1 whose vertical position < 0.5)
        tell application "System Events"
            keystroke "c" using {command down} -- ⌘C
            keystroke "a" using {shift down, command down} -- ⇧⌘A
        end tell
        set theText to the clipboard
    end tell
end tell
set TID to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to tab
set theTextFields to text items of theText
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to TID
set {theDate, theLessonNo, theStudent} to {item 2, item 4, item 6} of theTextFields