Reading statusbar from another application - c++

Question

I'm trying to read the text from another application's statusbar that contains multiple panels. How would I go about that. I have tried to allocate memory in the other application and read that buffer based on this:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5570/Stealing-Program-s-Memory
My current code is:
GetWindowThreadProcessId(grxstatusbar, &statusbarpid);
statusbarprocess = OpenProcess(PROCESS_VM_OPERATION | PROCESS_VM_READ | PROCESS_VM_WRITE | PROCESS_QUERY_INFORMATION, FALSE, statusbarpid);
char* _buffer = nullptr;
char buffer[20];
_buffer = (char*)VirtualAllocEx(statusbarprocess, NULL, 20, MEM_COMMIT, PAGE_READWRITE);
WriteProcessMemory(statusbarprocess, _buffer, &buffer, 20, NULL);
SendMessage(grxstatusbar, SB_GETTEXT, (WPARAM)0, (LPARAM)_buffer);
ReadProcessMemory(statusbarprocess, _buffer, buffer, 20, NULL);
VirtualFreeEx(statusbarprocess, _buffer, 0, MEM_RELEASE);
However, buffer is always just gibberish. What would be the best way to approach this problem.

Answer 1

EDIT *****
That won't work if target window is UNICODE. You can use SB_GETTEXTLENGTH to find the text length. Using the UNICODE version:
int char_count;
char_count = SendMessageW(hwndTarget, SB_GETTEXTLENGTH, 1, 0);
if (char_count <= 0)
return 0;
char_count = LOWORD(char_count) + 1;
int datalen = LOWORD(char_count);
datalen *= sizeof(wchar_t);
void* data = VirtualAllocEx(hprocess, NULL, datalen,
MEM_RESERVE | MEM_COMMIT, PAGE_READWRITE);
SendMessageW(hwndTarget, SB_GETTEXT, 1, (LPARAM)data);
wchar_t *buf = new wchar_t[char_count];
if (ReadProcessMemory(hprocess, data, buf, datalen, 0))
std::wcout << "buf: " << buf << "\n";
delete[]buf;
VirtualFreeEx(hprocess, data, 0, MEM_RELEASE);
CloseHandle(hprocess);