best approach to read what was written to the screen?

[Patrick]

Hi Everyone

Is there a best approach to read what was written to the screen? and 
possibly to get the attributes as well ?

Would it be good to dump a screen to a file, restore the file to a pad 
and then parse what is on the pad? Or perhaps the screen and attributes 
to-be-parsed could be copied to a pad directly?

Any hints or tips would be very much appreciated.

-Patrick