Output LRESULT to console - c++

Question

I'm trying to output text from Notepad window to console and it's always 0.
What I'm doing wrong?
int main()
{
HWND hwnd = (HWND)0x0031019C; // Window Handler of Notepad
char szBuf[4096];
HWND hwndEdit;
LRESULT result;
hwndEdit = FindWindowEx(hwnd, NULL, L"Edit", NULL); // Class for edit box
result = SendMessage(hwndEdit, WM_GETTEXT, sizeof(szBuf) / sizeof(szBuf[0]), (LPARAM)szBuf);
cout<<"Contents: \n"<<result;
cin.get();
return 0;
}
I tried print_f, but it outputs unreadable characters:
printf( "Contents: %s\n", result, szBuf );

Answer 1

It looks to me like you probably have a little bit of a mismatch happening.
Based on the L"Edit", you seem to be doing a Unicode build (otherwise, you'd get an error message about not being able to convert an wchar_t const[5] to LPCSTR, and the code wouldn't compile.
If you do a Unicode build, however, WM_GETTEXT is going to write Unicode data to your buffer, so you need to prepare for and use Unicode instead of narrow characters for your buffer.
For convenience, I've modified it a little to find Notepad instead of using a hard-coded Window handle.
#include <windows.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#define elements(b) (sizeof(b)/sizeof(b[0]))
int main() {
HWND hwnd; // Window Handler of Notepad
wchar_t buf[4096]={0};
HWND hwndEdit;
LRESULT result;
hwnd=FindWindowEx(NULL, NULL, L"Notepad", NULL);
hwndEdit=FindWindowEx(hwnd, NULL, L"Edit", NULL); // Class for edit box
result = SendMessage(hwndEdit, WM_GETTEXT, elements(buf), (LPARAM)buf);
printf("%S", buf);
return 0;
}
I built with:
cl /DUNICODE whatever.cpp user32.lib
Then I did a quick test that printed out exactly the text I'd typed into Notepad. To verify the result, I then edited the text in notepad, ran it again, and it printed out the modified text.