Extract internal EXE info

Question

Windows EXE files have some metadata like CompanyName, FileVersion, InternalName, ProductName, OriginalFileName, ProductVersion, etc.

How can I extract such metadata from using PHP?

Answer 1

I got curious about this, so I decided to write this function:

function getFileVersionInfo($filename,$encoding='UTF-8'){
    $dat = file_get_contents($filename);
    if($pos=strpos($dat,mb_convert_encoding('VS_VERSION_INFO','UTF-16LE'))){
        $pos-= 6;
        $six = unpack('v*',substr($dat,$pos,6));
        $dat = substr($dat,$pos,$six[1]);
        if($pos=strpos($dat,mb_convert_encoding('StringFileInfo','UTF-16LE'))){
            $pos+= 54;
            $res = [];
            $six = unpack('v*',substr($dat,$pos,6));
            while($six[2]){
                $nul = strpos($dat,"\0\0\0",$pos+6)+1;
                $key = mb_convert_encoding(substr($dat,$pos+6,$nul-$pos-6),$encoding,'UTF-16LE');
                $val = mb_convert_encoding(substr($dat,ceil(($nul+2)/4)*4,$six[2]*2-2),$encoding,'UTF-16LE');
                $res[$key] = $val;
                $pos+= ceil($six[1]/4)*4;
                $six = unpack('v*',substr($dat,$pos,6));
            }
            return $res;
        }
    }
}

It works with 32-bit and 64-bit exe. Usage example:

echo "<pre>".print_r(getFileVersionInfo('notepad.exe'),1)."</pre>";
echo "<pre>".print_r(getFileVersionInfo('php.exe'),1)."</pre>";
echo "<pre>".print_r(getFileVersionInfo('jre-7u9-windows-x64.exe'),1)."</pre>";

notepad.exe (32-bit):

Array
(
    [CompanyName] => Microsoft Corporation
    [FileDescription] => Notepad
    [FileVersion] => 6.1.7600.16385 (win7_rtm.090713-1255)
    [InternalName] => Notepad
    [LegalCopyright] => © Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
    [OriginalFilename] => NOTEPAD.EXE
    [ProductName] => Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
    [ProductVersion] => 6.1.7600.16385
)

php.exe (32-bit):

Array
(
    [Comments] => Thanks to Edin Kadribasic, Marcus Boerger, Johannes Schlueter, Moriyoshi Koizumi, Xinchen Hui
    [CompanyName] => The PHP Group
    [FileDescription] => CLI
    [FileVersion] => 7.0.12
    [InternalName] => CLI SAPI
    [LegalCopyright] => Copyright © 1997-2016 The PHP Group
    [LegalTrademarks] => PHP
    [OriginalFilename] => php.exe
    [ProductName] => PHP
    [ProductVersion] => 7.0.12
    [URL] => http://www.php.net
)

jre-7u9-windows-x64.exe (64-bit):

Array
(
    [CompanyName] => Oracle Corporation
    [FileDescription] => Java(TM) Platform SE binary
    [FileVersion] => 7.0.90.5
    [Full Version] => 1.7.0_09-b05
    [InternalName] => Setup Launcher
    [LegalCopyright] => Copyright © 2012
    [OriginalFilename] => jinstall.exe
    [ProductName] => Java(TM) Platform SE 7 U9
    [ProductVersion] => 7.0.90.5
)

Something interesting about php.exe: the Comments and URL don't show up in the Details tab. At least in my computer.

Enjoy.

Update 1: I forgot error checking. Now it returns null if the version info doesn't exist.

Update 2: Many thanks to @Abela for bringing an encoding issue to my attention.

I added an optional 2nd parameter that defaults to UTF-8 which should work for most purposes. If you need single-byte-character output, use ISO-8859-1 instead, like this:

getFileVersionInfo('php.exe','ISO-8859-1');