Are you the one who is launching the Nethack program, or is it already running, and you ar e trying to capture the text after Nethack is launched ?
If you are launching it you can try using one of the python popen() calls to redirect the screen output to your python program. I havne't doen this myself, but I've seen this suggested to many people who have asked a similar question. Also- you can try posting a message to the Python Tutor- as well as googling for python popen, to look for examples. Another alternative, is to use the tee.exe unix util (ported to wn32) which will duplicate screen I/O to a file, or some other place. Try googling for "unix utilities win32" -or similar combinations of these words. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list