I would like to get the text from a program with Python, for example from notepad. Can I "request" this text, just like from a website? I thought about something like this:
A document in Notepad:
Hello World!
This is a text!
GetText.py:
get_text("notepad.exe")
>>> Hello World!\nThis is a text!
Is this possible?
No, you can't, not directly.
There are various accessibility, etc. APIs you could use to try and "read" the user interface of another program, but that's certainly a lot more involved than just a simple get_text() style call.
(And for Windows Notepad, you can enumerate the Notepad main window's child windows, find the edit/rich-text control it's using and send a WM_GETTEXT message (if my memory serves) and hope it sends you some of the current text back...)
You can open the file in read-mode and simply print each line of the file using a for loop:
a_file = open('notepad.exe', 'r')
for line in a_file:
print(line)
a_file.close() #Make sure you close whatever file you open
If you are using Jupyter Notebook, make sure notepad.exe is in the same directory as you have your notebook opened in.
Side note: If you have experience with the command line (e.g. Linux), you can also open it in a text editor like vim. There, you can more readily see and edit it.
Related
i get the file location from the text document but the program opens and closes immediately it won't open at all how can i fix this.
Is it because the problem is launcher.exe?
Example
file = open("fihrist.txt", "r")
read = file.readline()
os.startfile(read)
the code is an example, it was written in the same logic
Text file example
Text file [C:\Sobee\Game\launcher.exe]
The method os.startfile() only starts an application it doesn't wait for the program to close.
If you want to run code after the program has ended you could try something like this: Python subprocess: Open a program and wait for user to save and close it
This is my first post on StackOverflow. I'm also a beginner in Python. So I was just tinkering with the open() function, I was making a simple program to replace text in other .txt files. Here is my code:
f = open("file.txt", "r+")
f.truncate(0)
f.write("This text has been replaced.")
f.close()
print("Text replaced")
So, after running this program, the text in "file.txt" is getting changed. However, when I do ctrl + z, it's showing Undo Reload from Disk?, and when you click OK, the text gets back to normal.
How to prevent this? I am using Python 3.9, Pycharm code editor.
Thank you
I think your question might be more about the PyCharm UI editor.
If I understand correctly:
you have "file.txt" open in the PyCharm editor
you run the code above
At this point, the filesystem has the "file.txt" with the updated contents. The PyCharm editor (buffer) still has the old contents.
When you ctrl+z, PyCharm notices the filesystem has been updated and prompts to see how you want to proceed. When you click "OK", PyCharm writes its buffer to the file, which is the original contents.
This question already has answers here:
Convert UTF-8 with BOM to UTF-8 with no BOM in Python
(7 answers)
Closed last year.
I'm opening a plain text file, parsing it, and adding different lines to existing, empty string variables. I add these variables into a new variable that is a multi-line fstring. Trying to write the data to a new text file is not behaving as expected.
Reading the original file works fine. Text is properly parsed, variables populated.
The multi-line fstring variable seems fine. Prints normally. Even tried formatting it different ways which I show below.
When writing to a new file, that's where the strangeness starts. I've tried 2 ways:
Straight coding the open function with w or w+
Adding the above to a function and using that inside main()
The file is saved to disk with the correct name. Trying to double-click open in Finder produces nothing. Right-click to open produces nothing. Trying to move to trash with command+delete gives an error:
It sounds like the file goes to trash, but as the file disappears from the folder a new one is created with the same name in its place.
If I try to open in TextMate via File > Open, it opens as a blank file with no errors.
Since I can't get rid of the file, I have to delete the directory and create the directory again with the same name, or force delete in Terminal using rm. Restarting the system does not help. Relaunching Finder does nothing. Saving text files from other apps works fine. Directory is chmod 755.
If I copy an existing text file into the output directory, rename it to what the file is expected to be named, and let python overwrite the contents, it doesn't work either. The file modification date changes (and I see the file "blink" in Finder) but the contents remain the same. However, the file is not corrupted and opens normally.
If I do the same but delete the text inside of the copied file first, then run the script, python writes no data to the file, I can't open it by double-clicking on it, and I get error -43 again with the odd non-trashing behavior.
The strangest thing is this: if I add another with open() at the end of the script, and open the file that was just created and supposedly written to, and print its contents, the contents print. It's like when the script ends the file contents are being removed or its being corrupted somehow. Tried to close the file inside the script even though it's not needed, but same behavior persists.
Code:
Here's the code for writing:
FORMAT='utf-8'
OUTPUT_DIR = '/Path/To/SaveFolder'
# as a function
def write_to_file(content, fpath, name):
the_file = os.path.join(fpath, name)
with open(the_file, 'w+', encoding=FORMAT) as t:
t.write(content)
def main():
print(f" Writing File...\n")
filename = f"{pcode}_{author}_{title}_text.txt"
write_to_file(multiline_var, OUTPUT_DIR, filename)
# or hard coded in main()
def main():
print(f" Writing File...\n")
filename = f"{pcode}_{author}_{title}_text.txt"
the_file = os.path.join(OUTPUT_DIR, filename)
with open(the_file, 'w+', encoding=FORMAT) as t:
t.write(multiline_var)
I have tried using w w+ wt and wt+ and with and without encoding='utf-8'
Here is an example of multi-line fstring variable:
# using triple quotes
multiline_var = f"""
[PROJ-{pcode}] {full_title} by {author}
{description}
{URL}
{DIVIDER_1}
{TEXT_BLURB}
Some text here and then {SOME_MORE_TEXT}"
{DIVIDER_1}
{SOME_LINK}
"""
# or inside parens
multiline_var = (
f"[PROJ-{pcode}] {full_title} by {author}\n"
f"{description}\n\n"
f"{URL}\n"
f"{DIVIDER_1}\n"
f"{TEXT_BLURB}\n\n"
f"Some text here and then {SOME_MORE_TEXT}\n"
f"{DIVIDER_1}\n\n"
f"{SOME_LINK}"
)
Using exiftool on the text file shows the following, so it looks the data is there but must be corrupted:
File Size : 1797 bytes
File Modification Date/Time : 2021:12:31 15:55:39-05:00
File Access Date/Time : 2021:12:31 15:58:13-05:00
File Inode Change Date/Time : 2021:12:31 15:55:39-05:00
File Permissions : -rw-r--r--
File Type : TXT
File Type Extension : txt
MIME Type : text/plain
MIME Encoding : utf-8
Byte Order Mark : No
Newlines : Unix LF
Line Count : 55
Word Count : 181
Not sure what I'm doing wrong. VScode shows no syntax errors in the script. There are no errors in Terminal when running the script. Have I made some simple mistake in the above code? Maybe the fstring variable is causing a problem?
Thanks to #bnaecker for leading me to the solution to this problem.
It appeared that when creating/writing to a text file with a long name, Python can corrupt it. Not sure why, as I save long names for images with Python image libraries all the time. Using a short name like "MyFile.txt" it worked just fine, but that was a red herring.
I have updated this post with my journey to the final solution for using the long names that are needed for my project, though I'm not sure why the problem exists.
First Attempts:
So far creating using a short name and then renaming to a long one.... attempts have failed. I did notice that python is locking the file it creates and never unlocks it. Not sure if this is the problem. Setting chflags with os.system('chflags nouchg') command does not work, not even with sudo, and not even in the Terminal doing it manually.
Using os.rename() in Python corrupts the file
Using os.system('mv oldFile.txt newFile.txt') corrupts the file
Manually using mv command in Terminal corrupts the file
Manually changing the filename in the Finder does not (wtf?)
I kept looking for workarounds but nothing did the job.
Round 2:
Progress!
After much tinkering, I discovered a hidden character inside the file. I ran cat /path/longfilename.txt in Terminal, selected and copied the output and pasted into VScode. Here is what I saw:
Somehow a hidden character is getting into the project code number.
Pasting it into a Unicode search engine it came up as a ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE also known in Unicode as EF BB BF. However, when pasting this symbol into TextMate it shows up as <U+FEFF> which is?...
The Byte Order Mark!
Opening a normal utf-8 text file in a hex editor also shows the files starting with EFBBBF for the BOM.
Now, the text file being read and parsed at first has no blank lines to start the file, so I added a line break, and also tried adding some spaces. This time when writing the file I could open it, however, after sending it to the trash, the same behavior occurred and the file was broken again. It seems that because other corrupted versions were in the trash, it added the symbol back to the file name for some reason.
So what appears to be happening, for whatever reason, when Python opens the text file I'm parsing that has no line break at the top, it seems to be grabbing the BOM from the file and adding that to the first variable which is grabbing the first line of the text file. Since that text is a number code that starts the file name, the BOM symbol is being added to the file name as well as the code inside the text file.
Just... wow
The Current Solution:
I have to leave a blank line at the start of the text file that I'm opening and parsing and a simple line break won't do it. I have no idea why this is. I added some spaces for good measure because randomly the BOM would be added to the variable and filename again. So far (knock on wood) as long as the first line of that initial file has some spaces and then a line break, and previous corrupted files have been deleted from the trash, a long file name can be used for all the files I'm creating and writing to without any problems.
This corruption even persists if I remove the encoding flag from both of the open functions I'm using (one to read and parse, the other to create and write).
If anyone knows why this is happening, please share. I've never seen it mentioned before. I'm not sure if it's a python 3.8 bug, a mac OS bug, the way TextMate wrote the original file, or a combination of these.
Correct Solution:
Thanks to #tripleee for the proper way to handle this, as I don't remember seeing this before, though I haven't been using python for very long.
In order to ignore the BOM, reading in the text file to be parsed with an encoding='utf-8-sig' does the job. Seems to be why it exists. :)
Problem solved.
I have copied a text from my software using pywinauto. Unfortunately, I don't know how to paste that to a text file. The following is the code that I wrote:
The last line of the code is not working as it should not. However, that is what I should do. Can anyone help me to solve this problem?
pywinauto.mouse.double_click(button='left', coords=(820,168))
pywinauto.keyboard.send_keys('^c')
f= open("trial.txt","w+")
f.write(pywinauto.keyboard.send_keys('^v'))```
I see that you're trying to paste the contents of clipboard, but there is no visual area to paste.
f.write() will accept text through a variable or, by passing some text. Invoking Ctrl + V is a GUI operation, which can't replace the text in f.write()
You can use pyperclip module to access the clipboard contents.
import pyperclip
"""yourcode"""
f.write(pyperclip.paste())
f.close()
You can also programatically copy something to system clipboard using pyperclip.
pyperclip.copy("This is a text copied to clipboard from Python script!!")
You can now check the contents by invoking Ctrl + V in some GUI application like notepad.
You can try send it hotkey
pyautogui.hotkey('ctrl','v')
Is there any easy way to handle multiple lines user input in command-line Python application?
I was looking for an answer without any result, because I don't want to:
read data from a file (I know, it's the easiest way);
create any GUI (let's stay with just a command line, OK?);
load text line by line (it should pasted at once, not typed and not pasted line by line);
work with each of lines separately (I'd like to have whole text as a string).
What I would like to achieve is to allow user pasting whole text (containing multiple lines) and capture the input as one string in entirely command-line tool. Is it possible in Python?
It would be great, if the solution worked both in Linux and Windows environments (I've heard that e.g. some solutions may cause problems due to the way cmd.exe works).
import sys
text = sys.stdin.read()
After pasting, you have to tell python that there is no more input by sending an end-of-file control character (ctrl+D in Linux, ctrl+Z followed by enter in Windows).
This method also works with pipes. If the above script is called paste.py, you can do
$ echo "hello" | python paste.py
and text will be equal to "hello\n". It's the same in windows:
C:\Python27>dir | python paste.py
The above command will save the output of dir to the text variable. There is no need to manually type an end-of-file character when the input is provided using pipes -- python will be notified automatically when the program creating the input has completed.
You could get the text from clipboard without any additional actions which raw_input() requires from a user to paste the multiline text:
import Tkinter
root = Tkinter.Tk()
root.withdraw()
text = root.clipboard_get()
root.destroy()
See also How do I copy a string to the clipboard on Windows using Python?
Use :
input = raw_input("Enter text")
These gets in input as a string all the input. So if you paste a whole text, all of it will be in the input variable.
EDIT: Apparently, this works only with Python Shell on Windows.