IDA Pro Export C style array using Python instead of GUI menu

Question

IDA Pro 6.95. From the menu I can use Edit... Export data... C unsigned char array (hex).

I want to do this in a Python script without rewriting what already works.

I have looked for a way to find a list of the commands I have performed through the GUI menus, but export data is not the sort of thing that appears in an IDC file.

Answer 1

Because this is a relatively basic functionality, there's not builtin way to call that command from IDAPython. You could do some Qt trickery to fake that GUI menu being clicked by the user, but that seems too much effort.

To me it seems as if the easiest and cleanest solution here is to simply call idaapi.get_many_bytes to get the buffer of data you're interesting in dumping, and then format it however you'd like.

for example, the following code snippet will output the binary data as a hexadecimal string:

buf = idaapi.get_many_bytes(start, end)
buf.encode('hex')

Or to get a c-like array:

buf = idaapi.get_many_bytes(start, end)
buf = buf.encode('hex')
two_hex_char_seq = map(operator.add, buf[::2], buf[1::2])
c_array = "{0x" + ", 0x".join(two_hex_char_seq) + "}"

Which will give an output similar to:

{0x31, 0x32, 0x33, 0x34, 0x35, 0x36, 0x37, 0x38, 0x39, 0x30}