binutils "strings" like functionality?

[Fredrik Lundh]

"cjl" wrote:

> I am working on a little script that needs to pull the strings out of a
> binary file, and then manipulate them with python.
>
> The command line utility "strings" (part of binutils) has exactly the
> functionality I need, but I was thinking about trying to implement this
> in pure python.

something like this could work:

    import re

    text = open(file, "rb").read()

    for m in re.finditer("([\x20-\x7f]{4,})[\n\0]", text):
        print m.start(), repr(m.group(1))

you may wish to modify the "[\x20-\x7f]" part to match your definition of
"printable characters".  "[-,.!?\w ]" is a reasonable choice in many cases...

if the files can be huge, use the mmap module to map the file into memory,
and run the RE on the mapped view.

</F>