Screen Text Capturing

Question

Is there a way to capture text from a specific location on the screen so that a any moment time an application can determine what text is in that location? Daniel Borras

Sam Hobbs · Answer

Yes Spy++ will likely help you very much. In the Spy++ toolbox is a finder tool; in the finder tool you can drag and drop to get information about a window or a control. If you can do that much and if you need to get the text from just the one application then it will be relatively easy and you will get an adequate level of eager assistants here to help you.

Daniel Borras · Answer

I understant the taking the information from the control would be the best approch but if you are looking at an application on the screen how would you determine the underlining control if you do not have access to the code? Does Spy++ give me information about and application's control? And still wouldn't it be easier to simple take a snap shot of the area and run text recognition software on it? Is there some reason why this is unworkable. I build a Poker Bot for the web that uses this approch. In all honesty I have never looked at Spy++ but I will do so this weekend. Daniel Borras

Sam Hobbs · Answer

Note that the original question says  capture text . If you know where in the screen (the desktop window) that text is and you have text recognition software then getting the image is relatively easy. I assume however that the text would be in a window whose position can vary and the location of the text within the window can change. If this is for general-purpose use then you need to be able to find the window and the text in the window. If the text is drawn as graphics then you must use text recognition software to get the text. Otherwise it would be much more efficient to get the text from the control and the way to do that depends on the control. So there are many variables of the requirements that have not yet been provided. If your requirements are diverse in the sense that your application needs to respond differently based on whether the specified area is either text or graphics then it will help for your program to determine the type of control that exists at that location. It would really help for you to understand about controls. It will likely help you to learn about the Spy++ tool.

Daniel Borras · Answer

Sam I don't mean to be rude but I'm not sure want you mean by vague it's a C# .Net 4.0 forum so I will be programming in C# using Microsoft Studio 2010. And the application that I will be looking at should not matter because I just need to determine what is being displayed in an area on the screen. The application that I will be using only applies in what tool sets are available so for the most part I am not at a point in selecting whether it will be a Window WPF Console Class etc. it all depends on what is available; that is why I posted the question. At the very least I need to be able to input some screen coordinates for a rectangle and it would return an image of what is currently being displayed there. There are a lot of tools to determine if there is text in an image. So is there a way within C# in any of the application that .Net 4.0 offers to determine what is being displayed on a particular part of the desktop screen? Can a location of the screen be captured as an image within .Net 4.0? And if so what would be the best approach? Within an html page I can use Screen-Scraping to determine what is within the web page; is there something like Screen-Scraping within .Net  for the desktop display? Just needed a place to start don't want to recreate the wheel if it is already out there. Thank you for your help Daniel Borras

Sam Hobbs · Answer

I am sorry but since your question is vague answers will either be vague or not relevant. The answer depends on the type of application and the type of window and the type of control. It wiil very much help if you can learn the basics of Windows programmming since then you would be better at asking the question. Even if we help you ask the proper question you need to understand the basics of Windows progrmming to use the answers.

Daniel Borras · Answer

Thank you for responding but what I'm looking for is to capture text on the screen but not necessarily within the same application. After which I will process the image or text to find out what was on the screen at that location. Daniel Borras

Gomathi Palaniswamy · Answer

Hi friend If you use any control in the form it will be easy to get text.