[Tutor] Converting From Unicode to ASCII!!

[Nevins Duret]

Hello all,

 

                Don't know if I'll be bashed on this forum for doing this,
but I will assure you I have the best intentions and 

simply want to apply a real world problem and how to go about solving it
using python3.1.  Here is my  predicament.

A good friend of mine locked herself out of her computer and forgot her
password.  I pretty much scoured the internet as 

a resource only to hit a brick wall.  I tried using ophcrack version 2.3.1
in order to obtain the password and felt completely at home 

being that it was Linux,  but then towards the end it failed and the output
of this file which seems to contain the Users and passwords

but in Unicode format:

 

Administrator:500::31d6cfe0d16ae931b73c59d7e0c089c 0:::
Guest:501::31d6cfe0d16ae931b73c59d7e0c089c0:::
SUPPORT_388945a0:1002::881037e0b6909b04b6900f7c806 dca6e:::
HelpAssistant:1004:b209ce7e3ff7aea1131906e9f5df481
9:d83f663c50bcd5815ccb94f9e38a9a4b:::
Beverly:1005:00006395b1acd69aaad3b435b51404ee:992a
c78ffb08204c592c6e47b916f85d:::

 

And it didn't complete as a result of this error message:

 

Tables found:
/mnt/hdc/tables/xp_free_small

Found one partition that contains hashes:
/mnt/hda1/WINDOWS/system32/config

Starting Ophcrack
QIconvCodec::convertFromUnicode: using ASCII for conversion, iconv_open
failed
QIconvCodec::convertToUnicode: using ASCII for conversion, iconv_open failed
/home/tux/launch.sh: line 100: 1044 Killed
ABLES_INLINE -w $FOUND/ -n $numcpu -o /tmp/ophcrack.txt $opts
Press a key to exit::

 

Now , I remember reading somewhere that Python is very good for converting
Unicode

data into ASCII and admittedly know nothing about this:  

 

Is there a work around in Python where I can simply import the file like and
convert it to readable string using 

A for loop.

 

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.  So far, I'm reading up on
this topic at this url:

http://docs.python.org/howto/unicode.html

 

Best Regards,

 

Nevins Duret

 

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