Where does this pywinauto exception get its list from?

Question

If I run:

from pywinauto.findwindows import find_windows

find_windows(best_match="affafa")

I get an exception that returns

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
 File "c:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pywinauto\findwindows.py", line 204, in find_windows
   best_match, wrapped_wins)
 File "c:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pywinauto\findbestmatch.py", line 497, in    find_best_control_matches
   raise MatchError(items = name_control_map.keys(), tofind = search_text)

   pywinauto.findbestmatch.MatchError: Could not find 'affafa' in '[u'CabinetWClass', u'Inbox (1,455) - ******@gmail.com - Gmail - Google Chrome', u'Chrome_WidgetWin_1', '', u'*new  2 - Notepad++Notepad++', u'python - Where does this pywinauto exception get its list from? - Stack Overflow - Google ChromeChrome_WidgetWin_1', u'C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe - pythonConsoleWindowClass1', u'C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe - pythonConsoleWindowClass0', u'C:\\Windows\\system32\\cmd.exe - pythonConsoleWindowClass2']' # this list has been shortened for security reasons

What I want to do is,Find out where the giant list of processes is coming from and directly call that.

So far ive been messing around with

find_windows(visible_only = False)
# and some of the other options listed in findwindows.py

but all the find_windows options only return a list of numbers which from documentation, i think are process IDs...., which for some reason do NOT match up with what i have ( for example, i create a "Calculator" and its process ID is 6566, and then i run find_windows() and i cannot find the process ID in it. So that's another issue I'm having.... but i can solve this problem if i can get my giant list.

This is my first question asked on stack overflow. I hope I made you guys proud

Answer 1

If you want to get a list of the names for all windows, you should use the next construction.

handles = pywinauto.findwindows.find_windows()
for w_handle in handles:
    wind = app.window_(handle=w_handle)
    print wind.Texts()

You may filter/extend the list by the next arguments of find_windows function:

• top_level_only Top level windows only (default=True)
• visible_only Visible windows only (default=True)
• enabled_only Enabled windows only (default=True)
• active_only Active windows only (default=False)