Clark's Tech Blog

How do you tell if Safari is done loading a page? There actually are quite a few ways and some work better than others. I’m largely following this hint. All the versions I’ve seen are in Applescript. I’ve not seen any in Python and Appscript though. (Note: I’ve only tested this against Safari 4 while the OSXHints post is about Safari 3 and the Safari 4 beta)

All I do is create a little function like the following:

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def wait_Safari_done():
 
	# wait for end of first failure
 
	while True:
		try:
			s = app(u'/System/Library/CoreServices/System Events.app').application_processes[u'Safari'].windows[1].groups[1].static_texts[1].name.get(resulttype=k.unicode_text)
			break
		except:
			time.sleep(1)
			continue
 
	# wait until second failure
 
	while True:
		try:
		 	s = app(u'/System/Library/CoreServices/System Events.app').application_processes[u'Safari'].windows[1].groups[1].static_texts[1].name.get(resulttype=k.unicode_text)
			print s
			print s[0:7]
			if s[0:7] == "Loading":
				continue
			print s[0:10]
			if s[0:10] == "Contacting":
				continue
			break
		except:
			time.sleep(1)

Basically the idea is to call System Events and to get an information string with info about the front Safari window. Initially it says “Contacting X” where X is the name of the server. When Safari is still loading the web page then the string has “Loading” followed by the url of the window, “completed” and the number of parts of the document loaded.

The only trick is that if Safari isn’t at the stage to return this message you get an error when you try to contact System Events. But, and this is where it’s really weird, when Safari is finished loading you also get an error. (My impression is that this is a new response with Safari 4 – so it may change again in the future) To catch these errors we use exceptions. I could probably take out the check to see if the beginning of the string says, “Loading”. That’s primarily just sanity checking and because you might wish to distinguish between the contacting phase and loading phases.

If you were writing a full GUI in Python you could extract enough information from this to put up a process bar. (Unlike Safari 4 which took the process bar out)

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