IDEA:Extracting/scraping text from within programs and games

[Dochappy]

I'm looking for a program that can extract text(which cannot be copied by normal means) from a program or game. I have tried several programs and only  SysExporter helped a little by  letting me copy a little of the text but  it still left a lot to be desired. Textractor,WinScraper,ShoWin, and Count Characters didn't work at all.

I contacted the creator of the text based game to see if he had any ideas and with the older games it was impossible to code so copying would work. In the newer versions he  built in an excel exporter that exports the roster and stats straight to an excel file.

I would love for that to be be possible with this game but it's an older version there's no more support for it so I'm stuck with typing the data by hand. The stats are constantly updated doing by hand will be a nightmare.

would it be possible to  code a small program that can extra all data from the game while it's open or maybe from the game files ?

thanks in advance

[PhilB66]

Give Control Content Saver a try. Other options... WinDowzer (Website in Russian but the application interface is English) and BinText

[Dochappy]

thanks for the links just finished downloading and trying  them out. Control Content Saver and Bintext worked but like SysExporter it was only able to get some of the text. WinDowzer could not get any of the tex. again thanks for the link.

the game is Extreme Warfare Revenge and Total Extreme Warfare 2007. maybe it's impossible due to the way its coded ?

[PhilB66]

Maybe TextGrabber then?

Also try extracting the text with JOCR or rOCR

[Renegade]

Look into localization and translation software. Resource Hacker is a good one.

[Dochappy]

never figured I'd get this much help. thanks guys for the kind response.  Text grabber JOCR and Rocr and Resource hacker couldn't copy the text either.
If only I could select the text and export it to a plain text or csv file I'd be happy lol

thanks again

[skwire]

Scraping text from games can be notoriously difficult and random.  Though I always say that you can accomplish anything with enough lines of code  , you may have to accept that this can't be accomplished.  It's possible that you might be able to leverage the ImageSearch/PixelSearch capabilities of AutoHotkey to "read" the game screen but it would be a ton of work.

[Dochappy]

I knew it would be a long shot from the start Skyline lol   maybe  if enough people request it the creator will  release something. thanks again guys greatly appreciated

[rjbull]

CopyText is another freeware that looks similar to Control Content Saver.  Warning - trying to use it has sometimes done my head in 

Another thought - maybe take a screenshot, put it in EverNote, and use EverNote's text recognition feature?  I should add that I'm using old EverNote 2.2, not the only current version which has gone cloud and which I haven't tried.

Maybe ABBYY Screenshot Reader, $10, which is like a more sophisticated equivalent of JOCR but doesn't need Microsoft Office installed?

[Dochappy]

copyText was one  of the first apps I tried. Never thought of evernote or ABBYY Screenshot reader either. I'll look for a demo of those two and see if it will help thanks.

[Dochappy]

I decided before giving up on this I would go back through each app  that was mentioned and try again. and to my surprise one of them finally worked. not sure what was different  but after trying Jorc again I got some pleasing results. It wasn't 100% accurate but most ocr programs aren't. so far it's crashed on me a few times but it captures more than SysExporter or any other  app I have tried.

Thanks for the help guys. it's greatly appreciated