Eggplant : How to read text with special characters like ' _ etc

Question

I am trying to read a text in a given rectangle using readText() function. The function works correctly except when it has to read some text which has special characters like ' _ & etc.

I tried using validCharacters with readText() function. But it didn't help.

Code -

put ReadText((287,125,810,164),validCharacters:"_-'.ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz01234567890") into  Login

I tried working with character collections. But that doesn't seem to be right because the text trying to pick is a dynamic text combination of numbers alphabets and a special character. So one cannot create a library of character collection of every alphabet (a-z, A-Z), numbers(0-9) and special characters.

Example of text trying to read:

Login_Userid1_1, Login'Userid1_1 So how do I read such text correctly

Answer 1

Debugging OCR is a bit of an imprecise science. EggPlant has a lot of OCR Parameters to tweak. When designing test cases it's best to try use other mechanisms to gather information whenever possible. ReadText() should be considered a last resort when more reliable methods are unavailable. When I've used it I've often needed to do a lot of trial and error to find the right set of settings, and SearchRectangle to get consistent results. Without seeing exactly what images you are trying to read text from it's difficult to impossible to troubleshoot where the issue might be.

One thing that does stand out to me is that you're trying to read strings that may contain underscores. ReadText() has an optional property IgnoreUnderscores which treats underscores as spaces. By default this property is set to ON. It defaults to ON because some OCR engines have problems identifying underscore characters consistently.

If you want to have ReadText() handle underscores you'll want to explicitly set this property to OFF.

ReadText(rect, validCharacters:chars, ignoreUnderscores:OFF)