Get titles of Non-Java Windows in Java

There is no solution using core Java, but the problem can be solved using JNI or for an easier time, JNA. As noted in the comments, no solution (that I know of) will be platform independent.

For instance, this demo program uses JNA to enumerate all Windows with title in a Windows platform, but will also include windows that are not top-level windows and even windows that aren't visible:

import java.util.ArrayList;import java.util.List;import com.sun.jna.Native;import com.sun.jna.Pointer;import com.sun.jna.win32.StdCallLibrary;public class EnumAllWindowNames {   static interface User32 extends StdCallLibrary {      User32 INSTANCE = (User32) Native.loadLibrary("user32", User32.class);      interface WNDENUMPROC extends StdCallCallback {         boolean callback(Pointer hWnd, Pointer arg);      }      boolean EnumWindows(WNDENUMPROC lpEnumFunc, Pointer userData);      int GetWindowTextA(Pointer hWnd, byte[] lpString, int nMaxCount);      Pointer GetWindow(Pointer hWnd, int uCmd);   }   public static List<String> getAllWindowNames() {      final List<String> windowNames = new ArrayList<String>();      final User32 user32 = User32.INSTANCE;      user32 .EnumWindows(new User32.WNDENUMPROC() {         @Override         public boolean callback(Pointer hWnd, Pointer arg) {            byte[] windowText = new byte[512];            user32.GetWindowTextA(hWnd, windowText, 512);            String wText = Native.toString(windowText).trim();            if (!wText.isEmpty()) {               windowNames.add(wText);            }            return true;         }      }, null);      return windowNames;   }   public static void main(String[] args) {      List<String> winNameList = getAllWindowNames();      for (String winName : winNameList) {         System.out.println(winName);      }   }}

Addition to @Hovercraft Full Of Eels, if you also have windows which are titled with unreadable characters and get "?" printed for those characters, try to:

• convert byte[] to string by using different encoding (as I understood)

see below:

String wText = Native.toString(windowText, "windows-1254").trim();

Possible encodings instead of "windows-1254 (which worked well for Turkish characters)":

• UTF-8
• UTF-16
• ASCII
• ISO-8859-1
• ...