Inconsistency in Match.text() - OCR related

no this is not so, this is a bug.

use instead:

print Region(m).text()

Actually,

Both m.text() and Region(m).text are producing the same result and both are acting on SCREEN instead of the match.

Here was the sample script.
========================
print "starting";

f = Finder("/Users/nanni/test-sikuli/source.png");
f.find("/Users/nanni/test-sikuli/to-extract.png");

while (f.hasNext()):

    m = f.next();

    print "From Region"
    print Region(m).text();
    print "From Match"
    print m.text();
    print "exists";

print "done";
========================

Output:
========================
starting

Found. Trying to extract Text.

From Region
Question#188121
~

From Match
Question#188121
~
done
========================
In both case, Question#188121 was present on SCREEN but not in "/Users/nanni/test-sikuli/source.png".

Is this expected ? If not, i could file a bug.

I am still unable to identify a mechanism to extract text from image on file system.

Sorry, you are absolutely right with your first finding:
I guess REGION always considers SCREEN co-ordinates to extract the text.

And so do Match (Region subclass) and Location. Sorry for the fast but wrong answer.

If you want to have a solution for that, you must step down to the Java API and work directly on buffered images (which is possible from the Sikuli script level since it is Jython - Java API: http://sikuli.org/doc/java-x/).

If you want to post a request bug, it might be to ask for the possibility, to have a stored/buffered image as a "virtual screen".

RaiMan, thanks for the inputs. I have raised a bug for Virtual Screen support. Also, as you said, i was able to achieve the functionality through Java api using BufferedImage.

Fine. Could you post an example code snippet, how to do this with BufferedImage.
Would help me and may be others.

RaiMan, https://github.com/suniljayaprakash/sikuli-ocr

really great. Thanks

You can try this free online ocr http://www.online-code.net/ocr.html to extract text from image.