How To Read Win32 Window Title Text

roho has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Monks,
I need to read the window title text (i.e, in the blue area at the very top of the window) of an open window in MSWin32. I have used Super Search, Google, and have scoured Dave Roth's "Win32 Perl Programming" book, but I cannot find any examples of how to locate an open window (specifically, I'm looking for my open Internet Explorer window), and retrieve the text of the window title. If anyone has done this before I would be eternally grateful for an example of the Win32 module and calling sequence used to get the window title text.

"Its not how hard you work, its how much you get done."

Comment on How To Read Win32 Window Title Text

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Re: How To Read Win32 Window Title Text by technojosh (Priest) on Nov 12, 2007 at 22:05 UTC
Win32::GuiTest should take care of that no problem. Here's a working example... `use Win32; use Win32::GuiTest qw(:ALL); my $searchString = 'Internet Explorer'; for (FindWindowLike()) { my $title = GetWindowText($_); next unless ( $title ); if( $title =~ /$searchString/ ) { print "$title\n"; } }` [download] Update: Added code example that applies to Internet Explorer	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: How To Read Win32 Window Title Text by roho (Bishop) on Nov 12, 2007 at 22:37 UTC
Thank you very much. That was exactly what I was looking for. "Its not how hard you work, its how much you get done."	[reply]
Re: How To Read Win32 Window Title Text by zer (Deacon) on Nov 12, 2007 at 21:02 UTC
have you looked at the OLE browser which comes with the activestate perl distribution? Otherwise i would use msdn to find the objects. I'm in php class right now so ill take a deeper look. Update: I've looked at the msdn for a bit. The class you would likely need is WebBrowserBase Class. Somewhere within that you should be able to find what you need. Looking a little closer i found WebBrowser.DocumentTitle method. Give it a shot, all of the code there is in MSLanguages but post if you need help.	[reply]
Re: How To Read Win32 Window Title Text by bmann (Priest) on Nov 12, 2007 at 22:12 UTC
Have a peek at How can I fetch text from Windows Title Bars?.	[reply]
Re: How To Read Win32 Window Title Text by SoaponaRope (Novice) on Nov 12, 2007 at 20:44 UTC
Just a suggestion (I'm not sure if you've thought of this or not, and I'm not sure how to do it). Have you considered opening the source HTML of the window you're looking at and reading the <title> tag?	[reply]
Re^2: How To Read Win32 Window Title Text by roho (Bishop) on Nov 12, 2007 at 20:53 UTC
Thanks for the suggestion, but I am not looking for the HTML title from within the page. I want to locate the open window (for Internet Explorer) from my Perl program and retrieve its title text. "Its not how hard you work, its how much you get done."	[reply]