decoding of a byte sequence into a Unicode string

Question

I am attempting to decode a byte sequence into a Unicode string from various types of files, such as .exe, .dll, and .deb files, using the pefile library in Python. However, I sometimes encounter Unicode decoding errors. How can I handle these errors effectively?

Here's the relevant code snippet:

import pefile

def get_section_addresses(file_path):
    section_addresses = {}
    pe = pefile.PE(file_path)
    for section in pe.sections:
        section_addresses[section.Name.decode().strip('\x00')] = section.VirtualAddress
    return section_addresses

section_addresses = get_section_addresses('D:/Binary/file/rufus.exe')
for name, address in section_addresses.items():
    print(f"{name}:{address:08X}")

I'm utilizing pefile to parse Portable Executable (PE) files, extracting section names and their corresponding virtual addresses. However, during the decoding of section names, I sometimes encounter Unicode decoding errors.

Answer 1

I've implemented error handling using nested try-except blocks

 try:
    pe = pefile.PE(file_path)
    for section in pe.sections:
        try:
            name = section.Name.decode().strip('\x00')
        except UnicodeDecodeError:
            name = "Undecodable"
        section_addresses[name] = section.VirtualAddress
except pefile.PEFormatError:
    print(f"Error: {file_path} is not a valid PE file.")
return section_addresses

Answer 2

You can specify encoding and try ignoring errors

section.Name.decode('utf-8', errors = 'ignore').strip('\x00')