Interested in how you go about doing this - in the good old days, you'd just read the data straight out of the memory mapped screen data - is this still possible under Windows with the HAL* in the way? Or do/did you read something to read from memory on the graphics card?Strategic Trader said:you can read any data that you see on a screen - either by writing a program that directly reads the screen data or else 'sniiffing' the data sent to the screen, so you can effectivly automate programs which seemingly are only manually controllable
I think what you need is OCR software that can be automatically used to grab a screen print, recognise the characters and then place the text elsewhere so it can be analysed. I did some work on this back in my Deal4Free days when they often took out the stops I had placed with them even though the stop price was never reached in the cash market. I wanted to write a program that would scrape D4F's prices off the screen, and automatically exit my position (or at least alert me) when my stop was reached without D4F ever knowing where my stop was. I never finished it as I gave up on discretionary trading - too much like hard work.zzaxx99 said:Can't see that this will work in my case - I want to be able to grab streaming prices off Advfn or MoneyAM and convert them to CSV - cut & paste doesn't work (presumably because all of the prices are being displayed by a Java applet).
In theory, you could capture the screen buffer and decode it, or maybe grab the window context and interrogate it, or patch the Java runtime to intercept the screen calls, or install a proxy server to intercept it - be any awful lot easier if someone else has already written it, though!![]()
that's an interesting idea - I hadn't thought of going the OCR route.bdholmes said:I think what you need is OCR software that can be automatically used to grab a screen print, recognise the characters and then place the text elsewhere so it can be analysed. I did some work on this back in my Deal4Free days when they often took out the stops I had placed with them even though the stop price was never reached in the cash market. I wanted to write a program that would scrape D4F's prices off the screen, and automatically exit my position (or at least alert me) when my stop was reached without D4F ever knowing where my stop was. I never finished it as I gave up on discretionary trading - too much like hard work.
The name of the software I looked at is Textract. It comes in both DLL format which can be called from most programming languages, and command executable format which can be scripted. You tell it the screen coordinates you want to capture (in your case where the ADFN prices are displayed) in x and y values, and it will take a screen print, OCR it and put the text in a file/variable ready to be used. Put it in a loop and you have a solution.
Cheers,
Brendan
AdBlock Detected
We get it, advertisements are annoying!
But it's thanks to our sponsors that access to Trade2Win remains free for all. By viewing our ads you help us pay our bills, so please support the site and disable your AdBlocker.