stringsext – search for multi-byte encoded strings in binary data

stringsext is a Unicode enhancement of the strings tool with additional functionalities: stringsext recognizes Cyrillic, Arabic, CJKV characters and other scripts in all supported multi-byte-encodings, while GNU strings fails in finding any of these scripts in UTF-16 and many other encodings.

stringsext prints all graphic character sequences in FILE or stdin that are at least MIN bytes long.

Unlike strings stringsext can be configured to search for valid characters not only in ASCII but also in many other input encodings, e.g.: UTF-8, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, BIG5-2003, EUC-JP, KOI8-R and many others. The option –list-encodings shows a list of valid encoding names based on the WHATWG Encoding Standard. When more than one encoding is specified, the scan is performed in different threads simultaneously.

When searching for UTF-16 encoded strings, 96% of all possible two byte sequences, interpreted as UTF-16 code unit, relate directly to Unicode codepoints. As a result, the probability of encountering valid Unicode characters in a random byte stream, interpreted as UTF-16, is also 96%. In order to reduce this big number of false positives, stringsext provides a parametrizable Unicode-block-filter.

Website: blog.getreu.net/projects/stringsext
Support: GitLab Code Repository
Developer: Jens Getreu
License: Apache License Version 2.0 or MIT License

stringsext is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials

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