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Topic created on: September 12, 2005 00:03 CDT by pedram .

Does anyone know of a Python lib for parsing .pdb files?

anonymouse		September 12, 2005 06:22.00 CDT
well i dont know if a python lib exists or not but there exists some pdbdumpers made by various people notable among them are andrew-de-quincyes pdbdump in sourceforge(has a c++ wrapper to the com interface of dia sdk ) matt-pietreks debughelpdemo in wheaty.net (comes with source as well as a precompiled binary) apart from that there are other utilities like w2k_pdbx (pdb exploder by sven b schreiber) clive turveys (sourcer authour) toys.exe and you can also take a took at oleg-starodumovs debuginfo.com (has some utilities that deal with pdb files)

asotirov		June 23, 2006 20:39.01 CDT
Do you want to actually parse the PDB files, or just wrap the DbgHelp API for loading them? The PDB file format is undocumented and I don't know of any tools that actaully use it directly. You should talk to Luis, he was doing some work on reverse engineering PDB files.

pedram		June 24, 2006 00:10.48 CDT
Alex, Good call. I did speak to Luis this past weekend and it looks like I'll be able to build on his work.

AlexIonescu		June 24, 2006 03:03.31 CDT
I know Luis had his own reasons for reversing the actual format and making a DbgHelp-independent parser, but personally, I'd still recommend using DIA or DbgHelp and writing a wrapper around it. Nothing stops MS from releasing a completely different PDB format in Orcas, which you'd have to re-code for. Also, PDBs have slightly changed in each version, so you'll have to handle the logic manually. If you use DIA, you get documented and powerful routines, and a guarantee they'll keep working. Of course, the problem is DIA only comes with MSVC 2003/2005, which does kind of suck... And DbgHelp itself doesn't have all the features so neatly exposed.

asotirov		June 25, 2006 22:23.18 CDT
I only have experience with DbgHelp. What is the benefit of using DIA instead? Does it offer access to more symbol information than DbgHelp? Is it updated more often?

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