Icon extraction made easy

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Introduction

Some times you might want to extract the application icon of a Win32 executable file and save it to an icon file. If so, you are at the right place. I have been searching for an article that does this but I couldn't find the one I required. What the article is trying to do is extract the application icon in raw format from a Portable Executable (PE) file and save it to an icon file.

An icon in an executable file is stored in a different format than that in an icon file as you might expect. So it requires a special treatment.

Most of the code in this article is taken from the SDK example named Iconpro. But the Iconpro example lacks a callable interface. This article just did it.

Using the code

You can use the class named CIconExtractor in your projects. For that, just include the header file ExtractResource.h. The class contains one and only method i.e.:

DWORD ExtractIconFromExe(LPCSTR SourceEXE,
                         LPCSTR TargetICON,UINT IconIndex);

The parameter SourceEXE is the name of the executable file whose icon is to be extracted, the TargetICON is the name of the new icon file. The parameter IconIndex needs a bit of explanation. An executable file can contain more than one icon. The icon that appears first in the resource directory of the executable file will be taken as the application icon by the Explorer. To extract the application icon, give IconIndex a value 0. If you use a value greater than 0, make sure that the value is less than the constant MAX_ICONS. You can change the value of the constant MAX_ICONS to a desired one.

Usually, an executable file will have resources other than icons, such as bitmaps, strings, cursers etc. This code is looking only for icons.

That's all, enjoy it.