Question about general possibilities using Python here, I don't really know enough about programming to know whether it's something that's doable, and if so, how do I go about it.
I have a program which is a simple desktop program, which you load files into. The program can then output various properties of the thing that's in the file, and depending on what you ask it to do will output a report. It outputs the report in text format, but not as a file, and instead actually, just in the program itself displays the report. Like this:
My question is that if I want to get this text output for a large number of files, I'm currently manually loading the files individually into the program making the report, copying this to a text file, and saving the text file.
Basically I want to know whether it's extremely difficult to get Python to do this for me, or not. If it is doable, are the resources available for me to read about how it might be done? Are there conditions about being able to run my program and various commands from the Python command box?
Hope my question's clear enough. Sorry if it's a bit garbled.
The tricky part here is
The program can then output various properties of the thing that's in the file, and depending on what you ask it to do will output a report.
Basically, if the desktop application you use has a command line interface, it is possible and relatively easy.
If this program has command line option to open a document and output a report in any format (print the report on the standard output, write it into a file on the disk, etc.), you can call that commands from a script python for each files you set in a list.
If your software doesn't have a CLI (Command Line Interface), it might be possible but more diffficult. In that case, you have to automate actions by using a library that will emulate clicks on the Window of you software (1. Click on Open 2. Click, click, click to select the file to load 3. Click on the button to generate a report etc.) It's a pain, but it can be considered.
You will find plenty of resources to learn by yourself how to code a python script. You will probably need to learn about lists, loops, files manipulations and maybe the subprocess library which will let you call any command from your python script.
I suggest you to start with Python3 instead of Python2 because it has a better support for unicode that could quickly become an issue if you have non ascii characters in your input files or in reports from your software.
Good luck ;)
If the only way you can get report is selecting and copy/pasting it from program GUI, the situation just begs for AutoIt instead of Python.
With Python it would be much more difficult. Unless you want to improve your python knowledge or course...
Simulating keypresses, you can open specific file in program (through sending ctrl+o or alt and navigating file menu). Simulating mouse or keypress - start report generation. Then simulate a mouse click in text area, and perform something like:
(just a skeleton of script, probably need to be modified to suit your situation and needs)
send("^{a}^{c}") ; to select all and copy (if these keys are supported in this program
$text = ClipGet() ; get contents of clipboard
$fout = FileOpen("somefile.txt",2)
FileWrite($fout,$text)
FileClose($fout)
To fully automate the task, in script you can get a list of source files in specific folder, and run this macro for each of them, automatically naming resulting txt files.
Related
I am looking for a solution to run a process with input files in python:
in my script I call a process using sub-process:
import subprocess as sp
sp.call(['C:\EnergyPlusV8-8-0\EP-Launch.exe'])
So the program I would like to launch is open, but then I need to choose 2 input files and then press the button "Simulate.." to execute the program(Energy Plus).
***comment:
I mean, after those code lines, the interface of the program(Energy Plus) is open, then I choose in that window which input files the program has to use. After that in the same interface of the program I start the simulation. I want to do these steps just in the python code, without interacte with the EnergyPlus interface. I hope I clearify the ambiguities
I would like to do the last steps automatically(knowing the input files location) in the python code.
How can I do this?
You won't be able to do this unless EnergyPlus is providing some kind of API, or you are prepared to write UI manipulation code, which would really depend on the type of application it is. Without more information I'm going to have to say what you want to do is not possible.
I've got a python program that reads input from a midi device and produces text output derived from the incoming MIDI messages. As a simple example, let's say that it's simply mapping MIDI Note On events to note names e.g. note_on(60) --> 'C'. I'd like to capture the output in real time to a GVIM (actually MacVim) window without losing the ability to edit the output with a computer keyboard, i.e. I need for MacVim to read from both an external program and from the computer keyboard.
What's the cleanest general way to implement that under the assumption that the MIDI reader will never generate output while I'm trying to type and vice-versa? I'd prefer to be able to give the python script a filename and have it start MacVim with that file open, but doing it with shell commands or connecting from within MacVim would also be acceptable.
Based on the answers to How do I read and write repeatedly from a process in vim?, it looks like vim does not easily support 2 input sources asynchronously. I'll leave the question open in case someone happens to know an elegant solution, but for now it seems like the best approach is have my python program write to a normal file, use 'tail -f' for real-time viewing, and edit afterwards.
I am in the works of creating a python program similar to this
. Anyway what i want to do is have users be able to modify there own programs but i need help understanding how this works. I have looked through the source code and am confused where this happens even if someone could just point me towards that that would be very helpful. I know that the programs will not be sandboxed but that is not something im worried about at the moment. If you could point me in any direction that would be great! Thank you!
The "robot programs" are just stored as plain text files.
There's a general-purpose text editor in editor.py. When you open a robot in a given view, e.g., the Qt4 view in qt4view.py, it just instantiates a text editor and hands it the robot's file. Again, the fact that the robot's file is a Python script doesn't matter; it just edits it as a text file.
The battle code, meanwhile, opens the same robot files as Python code that the text editor opens as text files. You can see this code in game.py: It just uses the subprocess module to run Python, passing the robot file as an argument.
My other answer deals with what you actually asked. But I don't think it's what you really wanted to know.
You just want to know how to run some Python script, that you've got a pathname for, in a separate Python interpreter, right?
While it's possible to figure that out from the pybotwar code, there's a whole lot of extra stuff that will get in the way of understanding it—the conf.py file, the configurable extra flags, etc.
But the answer is simple: Use the subprocess module, just as you would for running any program. In this case, the Python interpreter is the executable (usually you want sys.executable, the same Python interpreter you're using), and the script you want to run as an argument. For example:
script_output = subprocess.check_output([sys.executable, script_path])
The subprocess documentation explains all the different options very nicely.
The situation is like this:
I want to capture the pop-ups of IPmsg.exe in my python program.
There is an easy way of doing it, which is reading from the log file. But I would like to know if this can be done without bringing log files into discussion.
For more on IPmsg.exe: http://ipmsg.org/index.html.en
That was being specific.
Now, what would be a generic approach to capturing the output of a windows based GUI program?
There are generally two ways to talk to GUI programs on Windows, if you hate the log files:
Use their command line interface! I doubt this has one that outputs to stdout as messages come in
Use the win32 api or a wrapper for it to search for specific windows (polling as necessary or installing hooks to find out when they appear) and then grabbing text from them using more api calls. See this question: Get text from popup window
+1 for using the log files by the way, far easier.
You can capture only the output from applications through Python that you start directly from Python e.g. using the subprocess module:
http://docs.python.org/library/subprocess.html
Otherwise you have basically no chance for reading the direct output of other applications.
I need to run the python program in the backend. To the script I have given one input file and the code is processing that file and creating new output file. Now if I change the input file content I don't want to run the code again. It should run in the back end continously and generate the output file. Please if someone knows the answer for this let me know.
thank you
Basically, you have to set up a so-called FileWatcher, i.e. some mechanism which looks out for changes in a file.
There are several techniques for watching file/directory changes in python. Have a look at this question: Monitoring contents of files/directories?. Another link is here, this is about directory changes but file changes are handled in a similar way. You could also google for "watch file changes python" in order to get a lot of answers :)
Note: If you're programming in windows, you should probably implement your program as windows service, look here for how to do that.