How to find via Python the icon associated with a Windows file?

Question

I'm developing a Python script to do file management on Windows. Essentially, I want to be able to move files to another location, and create in their place a shortcut to a Python script which will do intermediate steps before opening the relocated file. I can currently move files, create functioning shortcuts, and set the shortcut icon image. The only thing I have left is to figure out how to detect the icon which is displayed for the file.

-Need to set the icon for a shortcut (which points to a '.py' script)

-This icon should match that of an arbitrary filetype, exe, etc, which I have the path to

-Hopefully done programmatically through Python. os.system() calls are acceptable. Extra credit is given for not requiring additional modules (though I already have win32com, winshell, pythoncom, etc)

Thanks in advance...

Answer 1

File type information is found in the registry. You could look up the file extension's type with the windows registry module.

Edit: It appears icons are available through shell32, as seen here. The Python equivalent seems to be ctypes.windll.shell32.ExtractIconA, though I'm not sure about the syntax.