How to retrieve the selected text from the active window

Question

I am trying to create a simple open source utility for windows using Python that can perform user-defined actions on the selected text of the currently active window. The utility should be activated using a pre-defined keyboard shortcut.

Usage is partially outlined in the following example:

1. The user selects some text using the mouse or the keyboard (in any application window)
2. The user presses a pre-defined keyboard shortcut
3. The selected text is retrieved by our utility or copied to clipboard (both approaches should be fine)
4. The keyboard shortcut-dependent action is performed on the selected text

What puzzles me is step 3. How the selected text is retrieved from the active window. This should work with all applications.

I use the pywin32 module.

Thanks in advance for your answers and tips.

Update #1:

Turns out that there are two approaches to accomplish the task:

1. Find the active window, then send a message/keystroke (Ctrl-C) to it in order to copy the selected text to the clipboard. Then the utility can work on the text by accessing it using the clipboard-related functions.
2. Find the active Window, then retrieve the selected text directly (without copying it to clipboard). This seems more difficult than the 1st approach.

As starting points:

Get the active window ID as Anurag Uniyal has pointed out in his reply.

Or get the window object with the following code:

import win32ui
wnd = win32ui.GetForegroundWindow()
print wnd.GetWindowText()

Answer 1

It won't be trivial but here is the starting point

import win32gui
hwnd = win32gui.GetForegroundWindow()
print win32gui.GetWindowText(hwnd)

Maybe you will have to use FindWindow,FindWindowEx to get child windows with focus

edit: also while experimenting use spy++ to see how it retrieves information about various windows, see hwnd, window class etc

basically if you can find a example in C/C++/C# it won't be difficult to translate that into pywin32 equivalent, so in a way it is win32 api specific question

Answer 2

You're far better off using the Ctrl-C method. Fetching text directly will work for something like an edit control, but is useless for retrieving text that an application has painted directly on its own window.