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WM_GETTEXTLENGTH

  • Article

This message is sent by an application to determine the length, in characters, of the text associated with a window. The length does not include the terminating null character.

WM_GETTEXTLENGTH wParam = 0; lParam = 0;

Return Values

The length, in characters, of the text indicates success.

  • Default Action
    The DefWindowProc function returns the length, in characters, of the text. Under certain conditions, this value may actually be greater than the length of the text. For more information, see the following Remarks section.

Remarks

For an edit control, the text to be copied is the content of the edit control. For a combo box, the text is the content of the edit control (or static-text) portion of the combo box. For a button, the text is the button name. For other windows, the text is the window title. To determine the length of an item in a list box, an application can use the LB_GETTEXTLEN message.

Under certain conditions, the DefWindowProc function returns a value that is larger than the actual length of the text. This occurs with certain mixtures of ANSI and Unicode, and is due to the system allowing for the possible existence of DBCS characters within the text. The return value, however, will always be at least as large as the actual length of the text; you can thus always use it to guide buffer allocation. This behavior can occur when an application uses both ANSI functions and common dialogs, which use Unicode.

To obtain the exact length of the text, use the WM_GETTEXT, LB_GETTEXT, or CB_GETLBTEXT messages, or the GetWindowText function.

Requirements

Runs on Versions Defined in Include Link to
Windows CE OS 1.0 and later Winuser.h    

Note   This API is part of the complete Windows CE OS package as provided by Microsoft. The functionality of a particular platform is determined by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and some devices may not support this API.

See Also

CB_GETLBTEXT, DefWindowProc, GetWindowText, GetWindowTextLength, LB_GETTEXT, LB_GETTEXTLEN, WM_GETTEXT

 Last updated on Tuesday, July 13, 2004

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