I hope I am not getting things mixed up. I want to read stdout stream from an external program (C++ program with an external SDK) which is currently sending its printf commands to a win32 console window (the standard output window from Visual Studio). It is an application (.exe) in the Active (Win32) mode and opens up a separate cmd window to display output (not in the visual studio debugger).
I want to capture the printf commands being executed in that program from an external python script. Most of the solutions/questions, I looked at use Popen, subprocess or ctypes which only work if the C/C++ program is launched from within python (and not separately).
I looked at this question. How to capture python interpreter and CMD output from Python
One of the code snippets it has for monkeypatching which says that this can be done is --
import sys
import StringIO
s = StringIO.StringIO()
sys.stdout = s
print "hey, this isn't going to stdout at all!"
print "where is it ?"
sys.stderr.write('It actually went to a StringIO object, I will show you now:\n')
sys.stderr.write(s.getvalue())
However, this only works with whatever I do from the python interpreter. From my understanding, the sys.stdout is interpreter specific and whenever I set sys.stdout to a StringIO object, it only redirects the stdout(s) launched within that python interpreter to the StringIO object.
How do I extend this capability to other CMD/wind32 windows?
I have looked into launching the C application from within the python, and am aware of how to redirect output using that technique. I am however, looking to launch my C/C++ application separately using Visual Studio and a way for a python script to be able to read content from it.
Any helpful pointers are much appreciated!
EDIT: Edited the description to make the visual studio part a bit more clear.