searchMemory function in pykd

I'm trying to understand how to use the searchMemory() function in pykd extension for windbg.

The documentation says the following:

Function searchMemory

searchMemory( (long)arg1, (int)arg2, (list)arg3) -> int :
Search in virtual memory

C++ signature :
unsigned __int64 searchMemory(unsigned __int64,unsigned long,class boost::python::list)

searchMemory( (long)arg1, (int)arg2, (str)arg3) -> int :
Search in virtual memory

C++ signature :
unsigned __int64 searchMemory(unsigned __int64,unsigned long,class std::basic_string<char,struct std::char_traits<char>,class std::allocator<char> >)

Does someone know what the arguments are and how should I use this function?

Solution

First, note that there are 2 overloads of the same method:

searchMemory( (long)arg1, (int)arg2, (list)arg3) -> int

and

searchMemory( (long)arg1, (int)arg2, (str)arg3) -> int

arg1 is the start address or offset at which to start the search,
arg2 is the length or amount of memory to search and
arg3 is the search term, which can be
- a string (std::string) or
- a list (of char)
the return value is an offset again, certainly the offset of the first occurrence, so to find the next occurrence, you have to search again

I have interpreted all this from the sources in pymemaccess.cpp [Codeplex] and never used it myself yet.

I'm neither very familiar with C++ nor with Python and even worse for the mapping between the two, but IMHO the std::string is a string of bytes and not Unicode characters, so you can put arbitraty bytes in there. It should also be suitable for ASCII search. But you might have to fiddle a bit for UTF-16 / UCS text. The same probably applies for the list of char, because it's not declared as wchar_t.