Terminal Get Text retrieving hidden screen text

Hi,

We are connecting using IBM EHLLAPI and a HOD file. When using Get Text, it retrieves all the text on the screen, including hidden text. According to the HLLAPI documentation, excluding this hidden text from the data stream is possible, but I can’t find a way to implement it.

  1. The values in the following table affect Copy Presentation Space (5), Copy
    Presentation Space to String (8), and Copy Field to String (34).
    Value Explanation
    DISPLAY Copy nondisplay fields in the presentation space to the target
    buffer area in the same manner as display fields. Current
    applications function normally.
    NODISPLAY Do not copy nondisplay fields in the presentation space to the
    target buffer area. Copy the nondisplay fields to the target buffer as
    a string of null characters. This allows applications to display the
    copied buffers in the presentation widow without displaying
    confidential information, such as passwords.

TLDR;
Using IBM Client Access terminal software, I can’t see some data on the screen, but UiPath Terminal’s Get Text retrieves that hidden text. I want to get the same text (and only the same text!) as the screen in the Terminal software.

I have tried using terminal.GetScreen(New UiPath.Terminal.Data.CommandOptions()) but this gives the same result.

Do you have any recommendations or thoughts on implementing this scenario? Not sure if this might be a feature request or if there is already an elegant solution.

Hey @MalBee can you use get full tex activiy and in the property section set the hidden to true

cheers Happy Automation

That’s a great suggestion; thank you, Sumit! Unfortunately, in our case, I can’t use that directly in a Terminal Scope. In my experimenting, I did find that I could use Application Scope and then do a CTRL-A, CTRL-C, and Get from Clipboard approach since Get Text seems to get status text from the Java-based terminal application we use rather than the text we can actually see on the screen!

This interim solution is workable for us, it would be great if we could tweak the actual Terminal Get Text to hide the text.

Hie @MalBee can you try this and check if this scrapping method works for you

cheers

Hi!

I’ve tried multiple combinations of Scraping method as well as trying different Target attributes and each time it returns no text at all. Most success still comes from CTRL-A, CTRL-C as an option.

Thank you for the suggestion though!

Have you tried to extract your text wih OCR method can you try with Get OCR text .make sure to use a better OCR engine which gives you the better result . and select as you are saying CTRL-A and CTRL-C are working for you to copy the text to the clipboard, you can implement this in an automated way. Here’s a simple way to do it:

  1. Use the Send Hotkey activity to send CTRL+A to select all the text.
  2. Use another Send Hotkey activity to send CTRL+C to copy the text to the clipboard.
  3. Use the Get From Clipboard activity to retrieve the copied text into a variable.

cheers

Thank you! Yes, I am already using the latter to do it with send hotkey and get from clipboard :slight_smile:

The hope is to to get the actual Terminal Activities function working would be first prize since it has a native Get Text that returns all the text (unfortunately also hidden text which I don’t want!)

Thanks again for your efforts!