Enumerating windows trough ctypes in python

Question

I'm trying to get a list of all visible windows using ctypes in Python3.3

But with the code i have, not a single window is returned. The EnumWindows function fails, and the returned error code is 0.

import ctypes

user32 = ctypes.windll.user32

def worker(hwnd, lParam):
    length = user32.GetWindowTextLengthW(hwnd) + 1
    buffer = ctypes.create_unicode_buffer(length)
    user32.GetWindowTextW(hwnd, buffer, length)
    print("Buff: ", repr(buffer.value))

a = ctypes.WINFUNCTYPE(ctypes.c_bool,
                       ctypes.POINTER(ctypes.c_int),
                       ctypes.POINTER(ctypes.c_int))(worker)

if not user32.EnumWindows(a, True):
    print("Err: ", ctypes.windll.kernel32.GetLastError())

Here is the current output:

Buff:  ''
Err:  0

And this is what i expected:

Buff: 'Python 3.3.2 shell'
Buff: 'test.py - C:\Users\...'
[...]

Could you point me in the right direction to achieve this? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The callback needs to return TRUE to continue the enumeration. Your callback is implicitly returning None, which is false. The following revised version should do what you want:

import ctypes
from ctypes import wintypes

WNDENUMPROC = ctypes.WINFUNCTYPE(wintypes.BOOL,
                                 wintypes.HWND,
                                 wintypes.LPARAM)
user32 = ctypes.windll.user32
user32.EnumWindows.argtypes = [
    WNDENUMPROC,
    wintypes.LPARAM]
user32.GetWindowTextLengthW.argtypes = [
    wintypes.HWND]
user32.GetWindowTextW.argtypes = [
    wintypes.HWND,
    wintypes.LPWSTR,
    ctypes.c_int]

def worker(hwnd, lParam):
    length = user32.GetWindowTextLengthW(hwnd) + 1
    buffer = ctypes.create_unicode_buffer(length)
    user32.GetWindowTextW(hwnd, buffer, length)
    print("Buff: ", repr(buffer.value))
    return True

cb_worker = WNDENUMPROC(worker)
if not user32.EnumWindows(cb_worker, 42):
    raise ctypes.WinError()

---

The HWND handle type is an alias for c_void_p. LPARAM is an integer that's the same storage size as a pointer. It's defined as follows in wintypes:

if ctypes.sizeof(ctypes.c_long) == ctypes.sizeof(ctypes.c_void_p):
    WPARAM = ctypes.c_ulong
    LPARAM = ctypes.c_long
elif ctypes.sizeof(ctypes.c_longlong) == ctypes.sizeof(ctypes.c_void_p):
    WPARAM = ctypes.c_ulonglong
    LPARAM = ctypes.c_longlong