How do I copy text from a dialog box? [closed]

In Windows sometimes I get an error dialog with long text. Manually typing out the exact details of an error message can be an annoying and lengthy process.

Is there way to copy text from a Windows dialog box?

Try just hitting Ctrl+C while the dialog has focus. If it is a normal modal Windows message box, it will put the text in the dialog in the clipboard for you.

The copied text should look something like this:

---------------------------
Window Title
---------------------------
The dialog box main text
---------------------------
OK   
---------------------------

If you have OneNote, you can take a screen clip, then right-click the pasted image (in OneNote) and select "Copy Text from Picture".

I usually have success with it. Sometimes I need to do a little editing though.

A bit of an old question, but here is a different solution:

For windows that don't natively support Ctrl+C, there are several utilities which will poke around all current processes and let you pull the text from standard window objects (listboxes, comboboxes, etc.)

I used one years ago that worked well, but can't remember the name of it. Here's another I just found by doing a quick search:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/sysexp.html

There's also Textify, which can grab text with a mouse click.

Have you ever wanted to copy some text from a dialog box which doesn’t provide such functionality?

Textify was created to solve this problem: you can point your mouse over the text, click on the mouse shortcut (Shift + Middle click by default), and get a selectable view of the text.

For dialogs and controls that don’t have a copy ability built-in, I prefer to use WinSpy++ to capture the raw text. (You simply use the picker-tool to select the window/control in question and then copy the text from the caption field.)