Binutils wishlist: Enhancement of 'strings' for Unicode strings

[Claus Fischer]

Dear GNU Binutils Folks,

I recently had to extract a version information from a Windows
OCX file. The version info is stored as a Unicode string in the
format "0, 15, 9, 3". Note that the binary is not all Unicode,
only a few so-called 'resources' are.

I wrote a small utility which can synchronize to Unicode
strings (alternating sequences of 0 bytes and printable ASCII bytes),
but with all the increasing use of Java, Windows, and
internationalized programs it might be helpful to somehow add
a Unicode feature to 'strings'.

I have attached my program just as a demo (bad style but works).
Perhaps the Unicode feature of 'strings' might allow the following
distinctions:
a) old-style behaviour (extract non-Unicode strings only)
b) Unicode strings only (this is what I needed)
c) extract both old-style and Unicode strings

I don't think character set conversion utilities are any help for that
kind of problem since binary files will contain a mix of different
character sets. Perhaps Unicode strings can even start at odd byte
indices.

Best regards,

Claus

-- 
Claus Fischer <address@hidden>
http://www.clausfischer.com/

unicodestrings.c
Description: unicodestrings.c