Scanning through Windows registry...

[Tim Golden]

In a spirit of being helpful... :)

The code below (which I imagine every Windows programmer writes
sometime in their Python life) mimics the os.walk functionality, yielding
the key, subkeys, and values under a particular starting point in the
registry. The "if __name__ == '__main__'" test run at the bottom does
more-or-less what you were asking for originally, I think, converting
some name to some other name wherever it appears.

<module regwalk.py>
import _winreg

HIVES = {
  "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" : _winreg.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,
  "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" : _winreg.HKEY_CURRENT_USER,
  "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT" : _winreg.HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT,
  "HKEY_USERS" : _winreg.HKEY_USERS,
  "HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG" : _winreg.HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG
}

class RegKey:
  
  def __init__ (self, name, key):
     self.name = name
     self.key = key
  
  def __str__ (self):
    return self.name

def walk (top):
  """walk the registry starting from the key represented by
  top in the form HIVE\\key\\subkey\\..\\subkey and generating
  key, subkey_names, values at each level.
  
  key is a lightly wrapped registry key, including the name
  and the HKEY object.
  subkey_names are simply names of the subkeys of that key
  values are 3-tuples containing (name, data, data-type).
  See the documentation for _winreg.EnumValue for more details.
  """
  if "\\" not in top: top += "\\"
  root, subkey = top.split ("\\", 1)
  key = _winreg.OpenKey (HIVES[root], subkey, 0, _winreg.KEY_READ | _winreg.KEY_SET_VALUE)
  
  subkeys = []
  i = 0
  while True:
    try:
      subkeys.append (_winreg.EnumKey (key, i))
      i += 1
    except EnvironmentError:
      break
  
  values = []
  i = 0
  while True:
    try:
      values.append (_winreg.EnumValue (key, i))
      i += 1
    except EnvironmentError:
      break

  yield RegKey (top, key), subkeys, values
  
  for subkey in subkeys:
    for result in walk (top + "\\" + subkey):
      yield result
  
if __name__ == '__main__':
  for key, subkey_names, values in walk ("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Software\\Python"):
    print key
    for (name, data, type) in values:
      print "  ", name, "=>", data
      if type == _winreg.REG_SZ and "TJG" in data:
        _winreg.SetValueEx (key.key, name, 0, type, data.replace ("TJG", "XYZ"))

</module regwalk.py>

TJG