MacOS – How to restore the disappeared addresses/contacts after upgrading to El Capitan

Apparently, Lion’s Automator actions are a bit more finicky about implicit data conversion between actions than Snow Leopard’s. In your case, the issue is the “Get Contact Information” action does not perform a conversion from groups into their contained contacts. This can be solved quite easily by inserting a “Get Selected Address Book Items” action set to “people” after the first one (which retrieves the selected groups) before the “New Text File” action. This will allow you to select groups in Address Book instead of having to select all their constituent members.

As to the encoding issue, that does not seem to have anything to do with the Automator workflow: testing with my iCloud address book (German, with lots of Czech and French contacts) neither your nor my variant produce any issues writing UTF-8 text as long as the “New Text File” action’s file format is set to “text (.txt, convert if necessary)”. If the issue persists on your system when using these settings, possible causes I can think of are

• TextEdit (or your editor of choice) is set to display the file as another encoding than UTF-8; in that case, it would mangle them on display.
• your address book might contain differently encoded characters, possibly from importing from older systems: Address Book is very good at hiding these, but they can cause a number of odd issues. There are a number of utilities out there claiming to fix broken Address Book records, but I have never tested them – YMMV.

Here is a script written quickly. Should work. But I have not revised it down to be efficient.

tell application "Contacts"

    (*get the names of all groups *)
    set theGroupNames to name of groups

    (*choose you current group, the one to keep entries*)
    set text_returnedCurrent to choose from list theGroupNames with prompt "Choose Current Group" default items "Work - Current" without multiple selections allowed

    (*choose you pending group, the one to remove entries*)
    set text_returnedPending to choose from list theGroupNames with prompt "Choose Pending Group" default items "Work - Pending" without multiple selections allowed
    (*Get the people/entries of the Current group*)
    set the_peopleCurrent to people of group (text_returnedCurrent as text)

    (*Get the people/entries of the Pending group*)
    set the_peoplePending to people of group (text_returnedPending as text)

    (*iterate through the people of the Current group*)
    repeat with i from 1 to number of items in the_peopleCurrent

        (*get a person from the  Current group*)
        set thisPersonCurrent to item i of the_peopleCurrent

        (*iterate through ALL the people of the Pending group**)
        repeat with x from 1 to number of items in the_peoplePending

            (*get a person from the  Pending group*)
            set thisPersonPending to item x of the_peoplePending

            (*Check if the person from the Current group is the same person as thisPersonPending*)
            if thisPersonCurrent is equal to thisPersonPending then
                (* if they are remove them.  *)
                remove thisPersonPending from group (text_returnedPending as text)

                (*save the contacts changes*)
                save

            end if
        end repeat

    end repeat

end tell