Home/ Questions/Q 7823849
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-02T08:23:42+00:00

This question is aimed for either Windows or Linux platforms. It’s a general question

  • 0

This question is aimed for either Windows or Linux platforms. It’s a general question that may come across as someone with ill intent, but that is not the case.

I would like to know if there is programmatic method to read the text being display in a window of another application? The language and GUI library is flexible, i.e. anyone will do.

The example is there will be a page in say a Chrome or Firefox browser window or a standalone third party app which will display some stats in one of its inner windows. I want to create an app which can read in some of those stats.

I apologise for the vagueness of this question but I’m looking into viable methods for a potential project.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Under windows for standard controls, for example if text for control is being set with WM_SETTEXT, then you can find this control by enumerating window hierarchy for aplication and call WM_GETTEXT to get that text.

    If text is drawn using WinAPI function like DrawText(), then it will be harder. You can use Windows Accessibility APIs, I have never used it but it looks promising. Here you will find some info on that:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/04/23/118893.aspx

    Maybe you should look for Chrome or Firefox APIs that would allow to achive what you want?

    • 0