Difficulty retrieving Dictionary Values

Shortcuts
,
1

Hi everyone!

I am trying to create a Shortcut to grab 5 news headlines from the Yahoo US news RSS feed and read them to me as part of a “wake up” shortcut that will run when I stop my alarm using the new iOS 13 shortcuts automations.

I am able to create a dictionary for these 5 headlines using the “Repeat with Each” action and iterating through the list. A Quick Look action (screenshot below) verifies that the Dictionary is created in JSON and the key-value pairs are the index number (1 through 5) and the corresponding headline as the value for each.

So far so good!

The problem comes when I am trying to retrieve each value individually to insert it in a Text action that will be the “script” for my “newscast”. I want the Text action to read like so: “Today’s first story is [Dictionary Value #1]. Up next, [Dictionary Value #2]” and so on, all the way through headline 5.

For “Dictionary Value #1” in my example above (and I’ve inserted screenshots below, along with an iCloud link to my shortcut) I use a Magic Variable to grab the Repeat Results from the End Repeat marker. I set the type to Dictionary and, when prompted, insert the key number as “1”. If I run the shortcut, this works and the headline associated with key #1 is inserted just fine in my Text action. However, if I repeat this process, and add a second Magic Variable, grabbing key value “2”, in addition to key value “1” nothing is inserted for 2 (but #1 still does insert the value for Key #1))

So, I’m not sure what is going on here: The Dictionary clearly exists (the Quick Look proves this) but I seem to be limited to grabbing only 1 value in the Text action.

Any help or ideas here would be very much appreciated!

38652F8D-4628-43AF-B456-CF778FECA2C7
38652F8D-4628-43AF-B456-CF778FECA2C7.jpeg1393×1641 258 KB

Link to Shortcut: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/697de43ad18144e5ade2648baab9209e

2

There doesn’t exist one dictionary, but 5 as you can see by the title 2 of 5. This means, each article is packed inside their own dictionaries, without any connection.

To fix this:

Get RSS items
Repeat with each
  Get variable (dict)
  Set dictionary value (Repeat index, repeat item)
  Set variable (dict)
End repeat
Text (Todays first story is (dict#1). Following up, (dict#2). ...)

This way, you assign the common dictionary dict each feed.

3

Thank you for reply! I think follow what you are saying. I may have to modify it a bit as I am using the Shortcuts 3.0 syntax, which no longer has the “Get Variable” action.

I’ll post back as to how this works out.

Thanks again!

4

Ok. Got it working! Had to do a (very) little bit of modification from your suggested method (as indicated, due to there no longer being a “Get Variable” action.

Final product below.

Thanks again!

71A13DF6-285E-44E4-AAA8-FB7E0D8AF4DE
71A13DF6-285E-44E4-AAA8-FB7E0D8AF4DE.jpeg1032×2388 246 KB

5

Nice! Glad I could help :wink:

1 Like