How can I extract text from flash inside a twebbrowser in Delphi XE2

Question

I try to make a program to catch data from a homepage which shows text inside a flash object.

It doesn't work with InnerHTML since the text is inside the flash object. Is there any way to do this? Help will be apreciated.

Possible, but extremely unlikely and difficult. I mean, you'd need to use some very extraordinary manipulation, for example taking a snapshot, then using OCR to convert the image of the text into plain text, etc. As David says, good luck. — Jerry Dodge, Apr 30 '13 at 19:44
That is, since the compiled flash object is showing *images*, not necessarily *text* — Jerry Dodge, Apr 30 '13 at 19:51

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 30 '13 at 19:45

You are missing several details from your attempted solution. However, one can assume that you are using an embedded web browser, and you are trying to use its methods to scrap content from a web page.

The thing is, a web page is not a single thing, but several objects that are retrieved by the web browser. The innerHTML property is, as you already know, just the text that tells the web browser to download some other content.

So, your actual question should be: how can I extract text from a Flash object?

The fact is, this is not easy nor reliable. But if you insist, start looking at a library like Delphi SWF SDK which can read and produce Flash files. This is a commercial library, thought.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 30 '13 at 21:03

There is no direct way of you accessing data from the flash file, what you are attempting to do is basically soft hacking / reverse engineering and usually if you have to ask such a question it's already out of your league.

Since this is pretty much a generalized question I'm going to give you exactly such answer:

First the easy part, identifying the swf file and any other data that is automatically downloaded to your computer, this is done using various programs or browser addons.
If you're lucky the text might be located outside of the compiled flash usually in a form of a xml file. If that's how it is then you're pretty much done, just a matter of reading the data.
If that is not the case then you will have to resort to getting a swf decompiler, some are free, good ones are not, besides that you will also need a Hex editor.

Nedless to say, nothing of this has anything to do with Delphi because that's just way out of scope of this question.

How can I extract text from flash inside a twebbrowser in Delphi XE2

2 Answers2