Scanning through Windows registry...

[Tim Golden]

Mike Driscoll wrote:
> On May 7, 4:45 am, Tim Golden <m... at timgolden.me.uk> wrote:
>> In a spirit of being helpful... :)

[... snip registry walker ...]

> This is pretty cool stuff, Tim. Of course, it would also seriously
> screw up some programs if you decided to replace the wrong phrase.
> Just a word of warning to the OP: be sure to make a backup of the
> registry before doing something like this. Trying to fix a messed up
> registry from the command line is not a fun way to spend the
> afternoon.

Good point, Mike. In a spirit of being even more helpful... the _winreg
module includes the functions SaveKey and LoadKey so as a crude
backup mechanism, you could do this:

<code snippet>
import time
import _winreg
import win32api
import win32security

#
# You need to have SeBackupPrivilege enabled for this to work
#
priv_flags = win32security.TOKEN_ADJUST_PRIVILEGES | win32security.TOKEN_QUERY
hToken = win32security.OpenProcessToken (win32api.GetCurrentProcess (), priv_flags)
privilege_id = win32security.LookupPrivilegeValue (None, "SeBackupPrivilege")
win32security.AdjustTokenPrivileges (hToken, 0, [(privilege_id, win32security.SE_PRIVILEGE_ENABLED)])

root = _winreg.OpenKey (_winreg.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, r"Software\Python\TEST")
#
# This will fail if the file already exists so make it uniqueish
#
_winreg.SaveKey (root, "c:/temp/HKLM_Software_Python-%s.reg" %  time.strftime ("%Y%m%d-%H%M%S"))

</code snippet>

Note that the file which this creates is *not* the same as a .reg file which the File > Export menu
option provides from within the registry editor. (In fact, I shouldn't really have called it .reg; call
it something else). It can be reloaded by the _winreg.LoadKey function -- which I notice is incorrectly 
named RegLoadKey in the docs after the underlying API call. The docs note that SeRestorePrivilege is 
required for this action, the counterpart to SeBackupPrivilege.

TJG