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Translate is a powerful string function that can create groups of characters and convert one set of characters to another. We'll describe the basic pieces of translate, and how to use that to look for string in a binary file. For example, if you want to look for Berkley copyrights in MicroSoft code.

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import string

#Translate in python has 2 pieces, a translation table and the translate call.
#The translation table is a list of 256 characters. Changing the order of the #characters is used for mapping

norm = string.maketrans('', '') #builds list of all characters
print len(norm) #256 characters

print string.maketrans('', '')[100] #is the letter d
print string.maketrans('', '')[101] #is the letter e
print string.maketrans('d','e')[100] #is now  also the letter e

#The second piece of translate, is the translate function itself.
#The translate function has 3 parts:

#1)string to translate
#2)translation table  -- always required
#3)deletion list

#Let's start simple and build 
#use translate to get groups of characters
#This can be done because translate's 3rd arg is to delete characters

#build list of all characters
norm = string.maketrans('', '') 

#delete letters
non_letters = string.translate(norm, norm, string.letters) 

#then take the list of non_letters and remove digits
non_alnum = string.translate(non_letters, all_chars, string.digits) 

#You'll notice the length shrinks appropriately as we delete
print len(all_chars),'\t256-(26*2 letters)=',len(non_letters),'\t204-10 digits=',len(non_alnum)

#Norm is a handy list to have around if all you are going to do is delete 
#characters. It would be nice if translate assumed Norm if the translation table arg was null.

#To translate all non-text to a '#', you have to have a one to one mapping for #each character in translate.
#Thus we make use of the python * operator to make a string of '#'
#of the appropriate length
trans_nontext=string.maketrans(non_alnum,'#'*len(non_alnum))

#A full program to examine strings in a binary file for Regents
# would look like this. We use regular expressions to convert all groups
# of '#' to a single '#'

import string,re

norm = string.maketrans('', '') #builds list of all characters
non_alnum = string.translate(norm, norm, string.letters+string.digits) 

#now examine the binary file. If Regents is in it. It contains the copyright
ftp_file=open('f:/tmp/ftp.exe','rb').read()

trans_nontext=string.maketrans(non_alnum,'#'*len(non_alnum))
cleaned=string.translate(ftp_file, trans_nontext)
for i in  re.sub('#+','#',cleaned).split('#'):
    if i.find('Regents')!=-1:
        print 'found it!',i
        break
    if i>5:
        print i

The conversion can be useful if you want to look for text strings in a file. It's fun to see what MS code has copyrighted material from BSD unix.

Created by John Nielsen on Fri, 7 Dec 2001 (PSF)
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