Video Hour 1: High Level: Getting text from programs

General ways (there are more) to get text & the order to try them:

Using COM to extract text from programs like: Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, IE
Getting Text from PDFs
Using Active Accessibility Viewer & UI Automation
ControlGet
Copy / Paste (when all else fails or when just need a quick solution)
OCR – Optical Character Recognition

Video Hour 2: Coding and Q&A

Script Highlight: Chrome.ahk by GeekDude

Automate Chrome without Selenium
Not as robust as COM w/IE but a great start at basic automation
Connect to running Chrome (running in Debug mode)
Page navigation
Get / Set elements & JavaScript Injection
Print pages to PDF
Capture to Screenshot
Some tutorial videos

Resources for getting text from programs

COM– Microsoft’s Component Object Model

Past webinars demonstrating overall concepts on Excel, IE /Web Scraping & Outlook
Lots of tutorials on Excel, Web Scraping & Outlook
Here are specific examples for Excel, IE, Outlook (email) ,Word, and PowerPoint

Extracting from PDFs

MS Word –Open pdf with word (requires 2013+) and getting text from programs
SnapOCR – API for extracting text from PDFs
ArchExch COM Object from Adobe (Must have full license version)
PDFtoText
Capture2Text
Ghostscript

Active Accessibility Viewer & UI Automation

Active Accessibility & UI Automation are built-in Microsoft architecture that can allow you to, programmatically, get text from programs

In these two webinars we demonstrated how possibilities & coding

Let’s see a few examples using:

ACC Library and Viewer
UI Automation via Jethrow
Screen Reader – UI Automation by nepter

ControlGet

On standard Windows controls, you can access them with ControlGet

Some things like listboxes, listviews, etc. have some pretty cool capabilities
Often newer programs do not use the standard window controls 🙁

OCR – Optical Character Recognition

Vis2 –OCR by isahound
Streamlined version of Tesseract – Jackie Sztuk

Being able to Automate Chrome has been a long-time goal of mine. With GeekDude’s Chrome.ahk Class you now can do this. Read more about his class on the AHK forum here.

If you didn’t see it, also check out my other tutorial on Setting values with Chrome and AutoHotkey.

Here is the function I demonstrate in the below video on Automating Chrome with AutoHotkey: Getting InnerText, OuterHTML & Values
Tab := Chrome.GetTab() ;Connect to Active tab

;********************Methd: Class, Tag, Name, ID **** ***********************************
data:=Chm_Get(Tab,Method:=”Name”,Attribute:=”s”,Index:=2)
;~ MsgBox % data.InnerText
DebugWindow(ExploreObj(data),1,1,200,0)

;********************Method: Class, Tag, Name, ID **** ***********************************
;********************Get Property***********************************
Chm_Get(Tab,Method=”Class”,Attribute=”hfeed”,Index=1){
Obj:={}
;***********Class*******************
if (Format(“{:L}”,Method)=”class”){ ;Case-insensitive check to see if method = Class
Obj.OuterHTML:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementsByClassName(‘” Attribute “‘)[” Index-1 “].outerHTML”).Value
Obj.Value:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementsByClassName(‘” Attribute “‘)[” Index-1 “].value”).Value
Obj.InnerText:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementsByClassName(‘” Attribute “‘)[” Index-1 “].innerText”).Value
Obj.TextContent:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementsByClassName(‘” Attribute “‘)[” Index-1 “].textContent”).Value
} ;***********Tag*******************
Else if (Format(“{:L}”,Method)=”tag”){ ;Case-insensitive check to see if method = Tag
Obj.OuterHTML:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementsByTagName(‘” Attribute “‘)[” Index-1 “].outerHTML”).Value
Obj.Value:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementsByTagName(‘” Attribute “‘)[” Index-1 “].value”).Value
Obj.InnerText:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementsByTagName(‘” Attribute “‘)[” Index-1 “].innerText”).Value
Obj.TextContent:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementsByTagName(‘” Attribute “‘)[” Index-1 “].textContent”).Value
} ;************Name******************
Else if (Format(“{:L}”,Method)=”name”){ ;Case-insensitive check to see if method = Name
Obj.OuterHTML:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementsByName(‘” Attribute “‘)[” Index-1 “].outerHTML”).Value
Obj.Value:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementsByName(‘” Attribute “‘)[” Index-1 “].value”).Value
Obj.InnerText:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementsByName(‘” Attribute “‘)[” Index-1 “].innerText”).Value
Obj.TextContent:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementsByName(‘” Attribute “‘)[” Index-1 “].textContent”).Value
} ;***********ID*******************
Else if (Format(“{:L}”,Method)=”id”){ ;Case-insensitive check to see if method = ID
Obj.OuterHTML:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementById(‘” Attribute “‘).outerHTML”).Value
Obj.Value:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementById(‘” Attribute “‘).value”).Value
Obj.InnerText:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementById(‘” Attribute “‘).innerText”).Value
Obj.TextContent:= Tab.Evaluate(“document.getElementById(‘” Attribute “‘).textContent”).Value
} Else{ MsgBox fix Attribute- Valid values are: Name, Class, Tag, ID
}
return obj
}

Tag: Save text

AutoHotkey webinar: Getting text from programs with AutoHotkey

Video Hour 1: High Level: Getting text from programs

Video Hour 2: Coding and Q&A

Script Highlight: Chrome.ahk by GeekDude

Resources for getting text from programs

COM– Microsoft’s Component Object Model

Extracting from PDFs

Active Accessibility Viewer & UI Automation

ControlGet

OCR – Optical Character Recognition

Automating Chrome with AutoHotkey: Getting InnerText, OuterHTML & Values

Video Tutorial Automating Chrome with AutoHotkey: Getting InnerText, OuterHTML & Values

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