php/dos : How do you parse a regedit export file?

Question

My objective is to look for Company key-value in the registry hive and then pull the corresponding Guid and other keys and values following it. So I figured i would run the regedit export command and then parse the file with php for the keys I need.

So after running the dos batch command

>regedit /E "output.txt" "HKLM\System....\Company1"

The output textfile seems to be in some kind of UNICODE format which isn't regex friendly. I'm using php to parse the file and pull the keys.

Here is the php code i'm using to parse the file

<?php 

$regfile = "output.txt";


$handle = fopen ("c:\\\\" . $regfile,"r");
//echo "handle: " . $file . "<br>";
$row = 1;


while ((($data = fgets($handle, 1024)) !== FALSE) ) {

    $num = count($data);
    echo "$num fields in line $row: \n";

$reg_section = $data;   
//$reg_section = "[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\TECHNOLOGIES\MEDIUS\CONFIG MANAGER\SYSTEM\COMPANIES\RECORD11]";

$pattern = "/^(\[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\\SOFTWARE\\\TECHNOLOGIES\\\MEDIUS\\\CONFIG MANAGER\\\SYSTEM\\\COMPANIES\\\RECORD(\d+)\])$/";
if ( preg_match($pattern, $reg_section )) { 

echo "<font color=red>Found</font><br>"; 

} else { 
echo "not found<br>"; 
echo $data . "<br>";
}
$row++;
} //end while 
fclose($handle);


?>

and the output looks like this....

1 fields in line 1: not found ÿþW�i�n�d�o�w�s� �R�e�g�i�s�t�r�y� �E�d�i�t�o�r� �V�e�r�s�i�o�n� �5�.�0�0� � 1 fields in line 2: not found

1 fields in line 3: not found [�H�K�E�Y��L�O�C�A�L��M�A�C�H�I�N�E�\�S�O�F�T�W�A�R�E�\�I�N�T�E�R�S�T�A�R� �T�E�C�H�N�O�L�O�G�I�E�S�\�X�M�E�D�I�U�S�\�C�O�N�F�I�G� �M�A�N�A�G�E�R�\�S�Y�S�T�E�M�\�C�O�M�P�A�N�I�E�S�]� � 1 fields in line 4: not found "�N�e�x�t� �R�e�c�o�r�d� �I�D�"�=�"�4�1�"� � 1 fields in line 5: not found

Any ideas how to approach this?

thanks in advance

Answer 1

Regular expressions work fine with unicode. Are you getting a specific error message?

Answer 2

I know there is a Perl library for this:

Parse::Win32Registry

Making a PHP class from it shouldn't be too difficult though. There's also a PECL extension for PHP that will parse Perl code:

http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/1712

Answer 3

From Windows XP the Regedit export is Unicode and therefore 2 bytes. You'll see this if you open up the export in notepad. I'm not sure older versions of php are able to handle unicode files.

Is there no way you can read the specific key you need? Through another tool etc. That would be a much more straighforward approach.

Answer 4

Try adding /A to REGEDIT command like this to produce compatible output:

REGEDIT /E /A "output.txt" "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System....\Company1"