getting text from WinXP console

[Chris Maloof]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 13:11:59 -0800, "Mark T." <nospam at nospam.com>
wrote:

>
>"Chris Maloof" <cjmaloof at gmail.com> wrote in message
>news:ubir315f5lm15qh96tf9i2qiepqhfndne7 at 4ax.com...
>> Hello,
>>
>> Does anyone know how I can read the ASCII text from a console window
>> (from another application) in WinXP?  It doesn't sound like a major
>> operation, but although I can find the window via pywin32, I haven't
>> been able to do anything with it.  I'd really just like to get the
>> window text into a string.
>>
>> By "console window", I mean the sort of thing that comes up when you
>> run "command" (although this particular one is for the game NetHack).
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Chris
>
>Check out the Win32 Console functions on MSDN, such as AlocConsole(),
>ReadConsoleOutput(), GetStdHandle().  I don't see an easy way to get the
>screen buffer handle unless you are the process that owns the console,
>however.
>
>Mark
>
Yup, this is pretty much closest to what ended up working, after some
more research.  There might have been an easier way, but for the
archives, here's the meat of what I did (as seen also in the
python-win32 mailing list):

import win32process
from ctypes import *
import time

# Constants from winbase.h in .NET SDK
STD_INPUT_HANDLE = c_uint(-10) # (not used here)
STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE = c_uint(-11)
STD_ERROR_HANDLE = c_uint(-12) # (not used here)

startup = win32process.STARTUPINFO()
(hProcess, hThread, dwProcessId, dwThreadId) = \
win32process.CreateProcess("C:\myConsoleApp.exe",
                          "-X",
                          None,
                          None,
                          0,
                          0,
                          None,
                          None,
                          startup)
time.sleep(1) #wait for console to initialize

# Use ctypes to simulate a struct from the Win32 API
class COORD(Structure):
   _fields_ = [("X", c_short),
               ("Y", c_short)]

topleft = COORD(0,0)

CHARS_TO_READ = 200
result = create_string_buffer(CHARS_TO_READ)
count = c_int()

windll.kernel32.AttachConsole(c_uint(dwProcessId))
inHandle = windll.kernel32.GetStdHandle(STD_INPUT_HANDLE)
outHandle = windll.kernel32.GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE)
errHandle = windll.kernel32.GetStdHandle(STD_ERROR_HANDLE)

# See Win32 API for definition
windll.kernel32.ReadConsoleOutputCharacterA(outHandle,
                                           result,
                                           CHARS_TO_READ,
                                           topleft,
                                           byref(count))

print result.value