Scanning through Windows registry...

[Mike Driscoll]

On May 7, 4:45 am, Tim Golden <m... at timgolden.me.uk> wrote:
> In a spirit of being helpful... :)
>
> The code below (which I imagine every Windows programmer writes
> sometime in their Python life) mimics the os.walk functionality, yielding
> the key, subkeys, and values under a particular starting point in the
> registry. The "if __name__ == '__main__'" test run at the bottom does
> more-or-less what you were asking for originally, I think, converting
> some name to some other name wherever it appears.
>
> <module regwalk.py>
> import _winreg
>
> HIVES = {
>   "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" : _winreg.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,
>   "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" : _winreg.HKEY_CURRENT_USER,
>   "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT" : _winreg.HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT,
>   "HKEY_USERS" : _winreg.HKEY_USERS,
>   "HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG" : _winreg.HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG
>
> }
>
> class RegKey:
>
>   def __init__ (self, name, key):
>      self.name = name
>      self.key = key
>
>   def __str__ (self):
>     return self.name
>
> def walk (top):
>   """walk the registry starting from the key represented by
>   top in the form HIVE\\key\\subkey\\..\\subkey and generating
>   key, subkey_names, values at each level.
>
>   key is a lightly wrapped registry key, including the name
>   and the HKEY object.
>   subkey_names are simply names of the subkeys of that key
>   values are 3-tuples containing (name, data, data-type).
>   See the documentation for _winreg.EnumValue for more details.
>   """
>   if "\\" not in top: top += "\\"
>   root, subkey = top.split ("\\", 1)
>   key = _winreg.OpenKey (HIVES[root], subkey, 0, _winreg.KEY_READ | _winreg.KEY_SET_VALUE)
>
>   subkeys = []
>   i = 0
>   while True:
>     try:
>       subkeys.append (_winreg.EnumKey (key, i))
>       i += 1
>     except EnvironmentError:
>       break
>
>   values = []
>   i = 0
>   while True:
>     try:
>       values.append (_winreg.EnumValue (key, i))
>       i += 1
>     except EnvironmentError:
>       break
>
>   yield RegKey (top, key), subkeys, values
>
>   for subkey in subkeys:
>     for result in walk (top + "\\" + subkey):
>       yield result
>
> if __name__ == '__main__':
>   for key, subkey_names, values in walk ("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\Software\\Python"):
>     print key
>     for (name, data, type) in values:
>       print "  ", name, "=>", data
>       if type == _winreg.REG_SZ and "TJG" in data:
>         _winreg.SetValueEx (key.key, name, 0, type, data.replace ("TJG", "XYZ"))
>
> </module regwalk.py>
>
> TJG

This is pretty cool stuff, Tim. Of course, it would also seriously
screw up some programs if you decided to replace the wrong phrase.
Just a word of warning to the OP: be sure to make a backup of the
registry before doing something like this. Trying to fix a messed up
registry from the command line is not a fun way to spend the
afternoon.

Mike