Capture Text from MouseOver Popup

[donflinn]

I need to capture the text in a popup which appears when the mouse hovers over a link on a page displayed in Internet Explorer. Is this possible to do in Autoit ? I do not want to have to click on the link to download a new page with the same information as in the popup.

[TheSaint]

With my level of skill and understanding, I see no way around using the source for each page your links are on.

So you would probably need to do something like the following.

1. Determine what link you are hovering over.

2. Get the source code for that link.

3. Then if possible, call up the same detail the hovering does.

To do that last, you will at the very least, need to know some Javascript, if not quite likely, more than that.

And that will only be possible if there is no encryption/protection.

Someone more versed in Web pages, who deals with Javascript etc, would be my first port of call.

The only other route, would be screen capture and OCR, which by the nature of a popup, would be fraught with difficulty.

If you knew the (window?) title of each popup, you might have easier access, but that seems highly unlikely to me.

EDIT

Of course, you could just look for a third party program that might do what you want.

Edited March 8, 2013 by TheSaint

[donflinn]

TheSaint,

Thank you for your response and suggestions. As you indicate, this seems to be a difficult problem. I'm surprised that there have not been more people wanting to do this. The only things similar that I can find on the Internet are people wanting the location of a cursor in a popup.

I had been hoping that there was an AutoIt function that I had overlooked (like INetGetSource) that would capture the popup text, but so far I have not found it.

What I am able to do is to Select All (Ctrl+A) and Copy the whole page to Excel. The text of the popup is captured along with the rest of the text on the page. Then the popup text can be extracted with a VBA macro. This is doable, but messy.

Thanks for your help.

[TheSaint]

Being able to get it via CTRL-A seems intriguing .... never occurred to me, that would be possible.

Can't you just do that programmatically (i.e. Send command), and then parse the text in the clipboard for what you want?

It seems you are pretty much doing that with VBA anyway, which should be far easier to do with AutoIt, and involve less steps ... certainly manual ones.

EDIT

You really should have asked all this in General Help & Support, not here in Developer Chat.

Edited March 9, 2013 by TheSaint