nixstrings 0.3.0

Linux/UNIX/*NIX strings command, in Cython

nixstrings

Linux/UNIX/*NIX strings command, in Cython

Over the years I've found many programs in digital forensics need this kind of functionality, some do it by piping strings with a subprocess, others use regexes, others implement a listcomp of their own.

Of those, usually the regex is the fastest, but it turns out you can actually go a bit faster with the help of C(ython).

This module has specialized functions that compile the comparisson of characters values to get the results as fast as possible. On synthethic benchmarks, the ascii_strings() function is almost 5x faster than the equivalent regex (that would berx = re.compile(f'[{ascii_printables}]{{4,}}') and then rx.findall(data)), but on real case scenarios it's usually just 2x faster before I/O becomes the main bottleneck.