How much of your binary executable is just ASCII text?

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2024-07-27 00:30:02

We sometimes use binary executable which can span megabytes. I wondered: how much text is contained in these binary files? To find out, I wrote a Python script which adds up the size of all sequences of more than 16 ASCII characters in the file.

My heuristic is simple but is not quite perfect: some long sequences might not be actual text and some short ASCII strings might be missed. Nevertheless, it should be good enough to get some insight.

I downloaded macOS binaries for some popular JavaScript runtimes. I find that tens of megabytes are used for what is likely ASCII strings.