Parsing Registry.pol (Local Group Policy) / Get numeric ASCII values of characters in a string?

As an update, I’ve found something potentially related:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/forums/html/topic?id=77777777-0000-0000-0000-000014753096&ps=100000

concatenation of characters ( bytes (( 72 + (it * 2) ) of ( positions  whose (it < ((

byte (

byte 20 of it) of files 
"<filename>.JOB" of folder 
"tasks" of windows folder)) - 1 ) of ( 
"..............................................................." & 
"................................................................" & 
"................................................................" & 
"................................................................" ) ) ) of files 
"<filename>.JOB" of folder 
"tasks" of windows folder)

I’m not yet sure how I’ll use this to split up a Registry.pol file into its individual registry keys and values, but I feel like that’s on the right track and might nudge someone’s memory.

I also think we can create the string of “.” dynamically to create a string of arbitrary size to use as an index of positions:

q: concatenation of "." of integers in (0, 255)
A: ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................



q:  concatenation  of "." of (integers in (0, size of it)) of file "c:\temp\hi.txt"
A: .................................................
T: 0.160 ms
I: singular string

And there’s a reference on the Registry.pol file format at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa374407(v=vs.85).aspx

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a good way to delimit the file. My earlier attempts were to concatenate substrings separated by “%00” of the file lines…but “%00” is also used as a valid value frequently within the file. We also can’t assume that the “;” character is always a delimiter between [key;value;type;size;data], because if the value is one of the “**DelValues” or “**DeleteKeys” directives, a semicolon-delimited list of key/value names follows. And I’m not sure how safe it is to use “[” and “]” to separate directives, I’m not sure how a square-bracket would be escaped if it’s part of the data.