There was a tweet about Numbers the other day:
#applescript can be such a pain sometimes to use. Simple things, like getting the selection of the current cell in #numbers is not easy info to come by.
I totally understand the author's feeling and my first take was based on a misunderstanding: in the tweet where my reply is (that you can see below his) I took his request as looking for the value of the selected cell, but now that I think of it, he meant "the selected thing within the current cell". So let's take a minute to see how hard it is to find that information in Number's dictionary (hint: it's not there, as far as I can tell):
We have 2 items to base our investigation on: "selection" and "cell".
Looking for "selection" does not bring anything interesting, we only get "selection range" which is a property of table and returns the "cells currently selected in the table." So let's check "cell". We end up with 1 class and 2 elements (one of table and one of range). So let's check the class:
cell n [inh. range] : A cell in a table
We get a number of properties for cell, including value that return various objects (number, date, text, boolean, or missing value) but further investigation does not help us finding something that returns the textual selection.
In fact, checking the dictionaries of the main applications delivered by Apple, only 2 seem to have a way to get a textual selection: Script Editor and Xcode. Page, Keynotes, Numbers, Notes, Preview, TextEdit, Contacts, Calendar, Reminders, Safari, etc. don't have anything. Finder, Mail, Terminal have a "selection" mechanism but only to select objects specific to their models and not to select a textual range.
Now, that doesn't mean it is not possible to get the textual selection in the above applications, just that a reasonable investigation into the various dictionaries did not provide us with that information.
So, now that we're stuck, the only path I'd think of to access that textual selection is to use GUI scripting to copy the selection, put it in the clipboard and access it from there.
tell application "Numbers"
activate
delay 0.1
tell application "System Events"
keystroke "c" using {command down}
end tell
end tell
set mySelection to the clipboard
Ok, it's ugly. But we got it.
Last but not least, I'd like to go back to that "selection" thing.
In Script Editor it's very easy to use:
tell application "Script Editor"
tell document "Untitled 3"
selection's properties
end tell
end tell
--> {class:selection-object, character range:{35, 60}, contents:"tell document \"Untitled 3\""}
We get textual information but only the actual text contents, nothing like what the clipboard tells us (with clipboard info for ex).
In Xcode we seem to be able to get the "selected character range" only of source files. RTF files return errors.
tell application "Xcode"
selected character range of document 4
end tell
--> {1, 5}
and it's easy to get mixed up since for each independent document opened, Xcode will create a "workspace document" that includes it. So if we just create a single source file outside of any project, we still need to refer to it as document 2 because document 1 will be the enclosing workspace...
Some applications I use frequently have good selection support: BBEdit works a bit like Script Editor where a simple "selection" in the application tell block will return the user visible selection. Word needs "selection's content" to return the textual value of the selection but selection itself offers plenty of properties including style, etc.