Service: Open URLs in Safari Tabs – John Gruber

John Gruber has posted a very useful script for Mac OS X Snow Leopard users that allows easy URL opening in blocks of text using Safari, global services, Perl, and some regular expressions. Here’s an excerpt:

“I’ve written a bunch that I use personally. One of my most-used is called “Open URLs in Safari Tabs”. Here’s how it works:

1. Select some text in any application.
2. Invoke the Open URLs in Safari Tabs service. (I usually do this via the control-click contextual menu.
3. The service passes the selected text to a script I wrote. The script finds all the URLs in the selected text, opens a new Safari window, and creates a tab in that new window for each of the URLs.”

Services are something not a lot of Mac users use. I know I don’t, but they have always been intriguing to me. I’ve tried to use Automator in the past, but I’ve never been successful.

Check out John’s Twitter here.