Question

Application Screen scraping

Asked by: pratikroy

Hello friends,

I am trying to develop a screen scraping program that will start a legacy emulator (which is using ALC protocol), run a few commands, and then return the result set (screen dump - in character format, like Ctrl-A / Ctrl-C in Notepad to copy all in the notepad) after each command execution. You might have figured out that the actual program is going to be very complicated, but I would like to concentrate on screenscraping so that I could get the so called easy part out. To start with I need to know if I can write the screen scraping program using Java? If so, I would appreciate any leads on the same. Will it be dependent on the protocol? I am assuming that since the execution would happen on windows based PC, and the emulator runs on the same PC, it should not matter which protocol the emulator actually uses to connect to the underlying legacy system. Please correct me if I am wrong.

If you guys have come across any source codes (or have any source codes) that can demonstrate the screen scraping, I would appreciate if you could share the same with me.

In the absence of any existing working demo/code, May be someone could write a simple screen scraping program that does the following:
1. Open 'calc.exe' - The inbuilt microsoft calculator.
2. Read a flat file from designated folder which has commands like:
3+4=
5*6=
8/2=
EOF
3. Execute all the commands from the above file, and save the output in a separate flat file with the original command with the result set, so the output file could look like:
3+4=7
5*6=30
8/2=4
EOF
4. Note that the calc supports Ctrl-C so the output could be captured using Ctrl-C. If you have not seen the 'help' of calc you may find the same interesting, especially the sections that talk about 'keyboard and keypad' -> Using Key Sequences as functions OR Using Keyboard equivalents of Calculator.

I would appreciate any help or guidance.

Thanks and Regards,
Pratik

  • calc-help.doc
    • 58 KB

    calc help, for those who need to refer to it

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Asked On
2009-09-07 at 15:03:52ID24713424
Tags

Application Screen scraping

Topic

Java Programming Language

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
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Answers

 

by: InteractiveMindPosted on 2009-09-08 at 06:04:53ID: 25281402

Java is capable of typing keys and clicking the mouse:
http://www.exampledepot.com/egs/java.awt/Simulate.html

it can also move the mouse cursor on the screen:
http://www.exampledepot.com/egs/java.awt/MoveMouse.html

and launch processes from the command line:
http://exampledepot.com/egs/java.lang/Exec.html?l=new

However, it's generally difficult to retrieve data from applications. In the case of the calculator, using Ctrl+C is a relatively simple approach. I've coded an example program that performs the calculations (see below).
But if you had a window application which you wanted to read from, then Java is not really up to the task (unless you take a screen shot, then perform OCR - which is not worth the effort). However, a more platform dependent language such as C/C++/C# etc., would be capable of getting a reference to a given GUI component, and retrieving the text from it, which would be a better approach.


Regarding the below code: Ctrl+C takes a short period to place the content onto the clipboard. So I've added a pause of 200 ms (you could possibly do less) to give the system enough time to do this before reading the content off the clipboard.

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.datatransfer.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
 
public class ScreenScrapeExample
{
	private Robot robot = null;
 
	public ScreenScrapeExample() throws Exception
	{
		// Get the commands from the file
		String[] commands = loadCommands();
 
		// Open the calculator, this is windows specific
		Process child = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("calc.exe");
 
		// Instantiate the robot
		robot = new Robot();
 
		// Type the commands
		for (int i = 0; i < commands.length; i++)
		{
			String command = commands[i];
			char[] c = command.toCharArray();
			for (int j = 0; j < c.length; j++)
			{
				switch (c[j])
				{
				case '+':
					robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_ADD);
					robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_ADD);
					break;
				case '-':
					robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_SUBTRACT);
					robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_SUBTRACT);
					break;
				case '*':
					robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_MULTIPLY);
					robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_MULTIPLY);
					break;
				case '/':
					robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_DIVIDE);
					robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_DIVIDE);
					break;
				case '=':
					robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_EQUALS);
					robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_EQUALS);
					break;
				default:
					robot.keyPress(c[j]);
					break;
				}
			}
 
			// now copy the answer
			robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_CONTROL);
			robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_C);
			robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_C);
			robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_CONTROL);
 
			// pause for 0.2s
			try
			{
				Thread.sleep(200);
			} catch (Exception e)
			{
			}
 
			// Read the answer from the clipboard
			String answer = getClipboard();
			outputAnswer(command + answer);
		}
		
		//close the calcultor using alt+f4
		robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_ALT);
		robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_F4);
		robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_F4);
		robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_ALT);
		
	}
 
	public void outputAnswer(String s)
	{
		// TO DO: write the answer to the output file here.
		System.out.println(s);
	}
 
	public static String getClipboard()
	{
		Transferable t = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getSystemClipboard()
				.getContents(null);
		try
		{
			if (t != null && t.isDataFlavorSupported(DataFlavor.stringFlavor))
			{
				String text = (String) t
						.getTransferData(DataFlavor.stringFlavor);
 
				return text.trim();
			}
		} catch (Exception e)
		{
		}
		return "";
	}
 
	public String[] loadCommands()
	{
		// TO DO: read the commands from a file here.
		return new String[] { "3+4=", "5*6=", "8/2=" };
	}
 
	public static void main(String[] a) throws Exception
	{
		new ScreenScrapeExample();
	}
}
                                              
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by: InteractiveMindPosted on 2009-09-08 at 06:08:49ID: 25281433

Oops, I think it's good practice to release all keys, so change this line:

    robot.keyPress(c[j]);

to:

    robot.keyPress(c[j]);
    robot.keyRelease(c[j]);

 

by: pratikroyPosted on 2009-09-17 at 11:03:46ID: 31625826

Thanks dude. You were spot on. Apologies for the delay in accepting your answers... I was just hoping that I might get some more answers on it ... but no one else answered. Perhaps nobody could think of any other solution :) Great and thanks once again :)

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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