Get Selected text in browser programatically

Question

Hi,

From my windows application, i want to detect selected text in "Internet Explorer", Firefox and any other browser.

Do you know what piece of code should i use in order to achieve this?

Thanks,

The idea is not to search for a text in IE, but instead "capture the selected text" in IE. By the way not only IE, but any windows application that has the focus One thing i can think of is to simulate a ctrl+c to copy selected text and then read the clipboard, but i don't like this solution either.

Im almost sure there should be a way to get the selected text using Windows API, i know that using EM_GETSELTEXT, WM_GETTEXT, EM_GETSEL might be useful, but they do not work in IE or any other browser, here is my problem....

Answer 1

This is a rather tall order. I think you may only have a slim chance of achieving this with IE, where you can load the same page as is loaded in the 'outside' browser into a WebBrowser control, and get the selected text. To the best of my knowledge, and on advice from someone who has long sought to do something like this, there is just no automation model for Firefox that is accessible to C# code without gargantuan effort and risk.

Do you have any control over the page? You might consider injecting something like jQuery to post the selection using an Ajax call, and set up a server to listen for that call.

Answer 2

Thanks ProfK, however:

There is no way to load the same page again, would never do that.

One thing i can think of is to simulate a ctrl+c to copy selected text and then read the clipboard, but i don't like this solution either.

Im almost sure there should be a way to get the selected text using Windows API, i know that using EM_GETSELTEXT, WM_GETTEXT, EM_GETSEL might be useful, but they do not work in IE or any other browser, here is my problem....

Answer 3

I would suggest that you look into using the WatiN API to test a web page for the presence of a specific string. WatiN currently supports IE 6, 7 and 8, and a CTP version exists for testing with Firefox 2.x and 3.x. This article describes how to use WatiN to search for a piece of text in a web page, and there is documentation on the WatiN site describing how to call WatiN from your application.

An initial starting point for your code would be:

using System;
using WatiN.Core;

public static class WatiNExample
{

    public static bool CheckUrlForText(string p_sUrl, string p_sText)
    {
        // Open a new Internet Explorer window and
        // go to the google website.
        IE ie = new IE(p_sUrl);

        try    
        {
            return ie.Text.Contains(p_sText));
        }
        finally
        {
            ie.Close();
        }
    }
}

Answer 4

GUYS???? Where are the Experts????? this shouldn't be so difficult :) (i guess it is otherwise i would have known it already :)).

All i need is to be able to capture selected text from any windows application and send it to my application. is it really very complicated?

I've seen an application that does it (http://wordweb.info/free/), but how?????

Thanks

Answer 5

Pretty sure Wordweb uses OCR. I tested it with a non-english language and it came up with garbage when some of the letters were nordic f.ex... It should have returned the word proper, and had no suggestion for what it was if it used any other technique...like gdi-hooking.

Answer 6

VB Script is a way to achieve that, but only in IE and only to copy (all web page) in clipboard. Then, you could paste it and manipulate the string thus retrieved in any application you like.

Option Explicit
Dim objShell
Set objShell=CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
objShell.Run "iexplore.exe http://www.google.com" ' or whatever page you need to copy from
WScript.Sleep 7000 ' just to wait IE to load the page
objShell.SendKeys "^a" ' selects all
objShell.SendKeys "^c" ' copy into clipboard