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When running a remote debugger to a linux server, is there a way to get IDA (7.0) to properly handle strings? When I go to the pseudocode view, I get things like this;

v7 = sub_804AD60((std::string *)&v16);
char *v5;

So clearly IDA has some handling of string types, and it's able to infer that one of these is a C++ string and the other a pointer to a C string. What I can't figure out is how to get that string? I've been searching for a locals window or something in the debugger with no luck, and hovering over v16 gets an int v16 with a memory address value. Surely there's some way to just get the actual string value of v16 or v5 in plain old ASCII or UTF-8 without having to dig it out of the hex view?

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  • Hi and welcome to RE.SE! For v5 you should be shown the value, but for something like a std::string it depends. I have IDA, but not the HexRays plugin, so I can't be of much help here. – 0xC0000022L♦ Oct 31 '18 at 21:15
  • Sometimes, we've to guess the data type. You can get the data type while debugging. Then press Y to change it. – Biswapriyo Oct 31 '18 at 21:25
  • The datatype is spot-on, it's 100% an std::string, but that string -- Hello World\0, should be somehow visible to me, and yet I can't find a way. – XeroxDucati Nov 1 '18 at 0:23
  • Locate a cursor on v16, press <kbd>Y</kbd>, enter std::string, press enter. – w s Nov 1 '18 at 7:39

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