Parse text from a screen grab

Question

Hey guys

Not sure the best way to explain this but i'll give it a shot. I'm trying to find a way to parse text/numbers from a screen grab in either C# or Java - whichever provides the easiest way, but preferably java.

An example would be as follows. You have a website/document/application with a block of text. You can take a screenshot of the specific area which contains this text. Once the screenshot has been taken you can extract a string from it containing the relevant characters.

Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks

Answer 1

There is some good info for C# in this question.

Answer 2

If you are taking a screenshot it will be saved into an image file. You can use OCR image tools to break it down into text, but it's not 100% always in the conversion. Parsing text and/or numbers is just basic code in C# or Java.

Answer 3

FreeOCR is best out of all the OCRs I've tried.

Answer 4

If you're ok with calling an external service to do the text recognition work for you, there's an API available - see http://www.wisetrend.com/wisetrend_ocr_cloud.shtml