ActiveState Code

Recipe 460508: Determine the available desktop area (primary monitor) on Windows

This recipe is the Python implementation of the SystemParametersInfoA() invocation required to retrieve the area that application windows can inhabit. On multi-monitor setups, the windows code returns the area on the primary monitor only. This recipe is the cleaned up version of this email post http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2003-May/162433.html .

Python 
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import ctypes

def work_area():
  class RECT(ctypes.Structure):
     _fields_ = [('left',ctypes.c_ulong),
                 ('top',ctypes.c_ulong),
                 ('right',ctypes.c_ulong),
                 ('bottom',ctypes.c_ulong)]
  r = RECT()
  ctypes.windll.user32.SystemParametersInfoA(win32con.SPI_GETWORKAREA, 0, ctypes.byref(r), 0)
  return map(int, (r.left, r.top, r.right, r.bottom))

print work_area()

Discussion

This recipe requires ctypes from http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/ctypes .

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