While trying to make an automator action that opens multiple tabs from selected text as input I ran into an applescript issue I wasn't able to solve for awhile. This includes the answer and I'm posting this here because I just wasn't able to find documentation on how to handle data in "input" for a receives selected "text" in "any application" automator action, everything is for files which comes in as a list already.
When putting an applescript action in, you get:
on run {input, parameters}
the problem here is that input isn't in a list format and trying to do anything with it breaks the script or throws an error. ie I can't do:
repeat with URL in input
set this_URL to URL
So how can I treat a list of selected text as a list of items?