Strings does not work at all. It spits out nothing but junk. There's not a single chuck of legible content.
If you want something quick and easy you can just look for instances of 'getURL' objects. These will always have the index of a string in the constant pool as an argument. From there you simply grab the value at that index and you have the URL.
Something even more primitive would only look for interesting strings in the constant pool. The constant pool is found at the top of an action block and you don't need to implement any instructions to get to it. By the way, the constant pool is the only place where you will find any "blobs of text".
If a variable or concatenated strings are passed to a getURL function in ActionScript then it's different. This is a 'getURL2' object. In this case you get an index to a table that contains variable names. From there you would have to look up the value of the variable, but you only have that if you've actually implemented all the instructions and you've been keeping track.
Text is... complicated... It's not just chunks of text or even character arrays. It's arrays of objects that contain all sorts of information, the most interesting bit being the particular glyph in a given font that should be displayed.
You can find a surprising number of external references just by looking in the constants pool of for instances of getURL without actually implementing a VM, but anything beyond that is a lot of work.
The JavaDocs for TransformSWF (which Describe SWF is built using) have quite a bit of useful information too.
Anyway, your original point that there's a simple solution that's at the very least a good start is still valid because a high number of external references in Flash can be found with minimal effort. For whatever reason, the major search engines chose to ignore Flash. Maybe they were waiting for a good solution instead of a good enough solution, but my guess is no one cares except Adobe.
If you want something quick and easy you can just look for instances of 'getURL' objects. These will always have the index of a string in the constant pool as an argument. From there you simply grab the value at that index and you have the URL.
Something even more primitive would only look for interesting strings in the constant pool. The constant pool is found at the top of an action block and you don't need to implement any instructions to get to it. By the way, the constant pool is the only place where you will find any "blobs of text".
If a variable or concatenated strings are passed to a getURL function in ActionScript then it's different. This is a 'getURL2' object. In this case you get an index to a table that contains variable names. From there you would have to look up the value of the variable, but you only have that if you've actually implemented all the instructions and you've been keeping track.
Text is... complicated... It's not just chunks of text or even character arrays. It's arrays of objects that contain all sorts of information, the most interesting bit being the particular glyph in a given font that should be displayed.
You can find a surprising number of external references just by looking in the constants pool of for instances of getURL without actually implementing a VM, but anything beyond that is a lot of work.
The JavaDocs for TransformSWF (which Describe SWF is built using) have quite a bit of useful information too.
Anyway, your original point that there's a simple solution that's at the very least a good start is still valid because a high number of external references in Flash can be found with minimal effort. For whatever reason, the major search engines chose to ignore Flash. Maybe they were waiting for a good solution instead of a good enough solution, but my guess is no one cares except Adobe.
http://www.flagstonesoftware.com/transform/datasheets/index....