Quote html for MarsEdit

I am using MarsEdit to post my blog entries, which is a nice editor (ok, it could sometimes have a more wysiwig mode, but in total I am happy with it).

One thing that I find often annoying or missing when writing posts is that there is no build in quotation mechanism for '<' in a <pre> block (many of my posts are rather technical and contain XML snippets).

Luckily MarsEdit has AppleScript support, so I wrote this little AppleScript script (actually I copied a good part from the supplied Add Paragraph Tags one):

tell application "MarsEdit"
  try
	set currentWindow to document 1
	on error errorMessage
		displayErrorMessage("Can’t add paragraph tags because no post windows are open. This script works on text in the frontmost post window.") of me
		return
  end try
	
  set currentTextView to selected text in currentWindow
  set numChars to number of (characters in currentTextView)
  set newBodyText to ""
	
  repeat with i from 1 to numChars
		
    set currentChar to character i in currentTextView
		
    if (currentChar is "<") then
      set newBodyText to newBodyText & "&lt;"
    else
      set newBodyText to newBodyText & currentChar
    end if
  end repeat
	
  set (selected text in document 1) to newBodyText	
end tell

This allows to quote the current selection. Save the script to
~/Library/Application Support/MarsEdit/Scripts/Quote Html.scpt.
It will then be availably in the ApppleScript Menu:

To use it, just select the text and then invoke this Quote Html menu item