Open .fla file without using Flash Authoring tool [closed]

Question

I have a .fla file with some text that I want to get at. Is there a free app than you can use to open .fla files, or just a tool to dump strings and pics?

Answer 1

With such question, I just experiment...

I went to deviantART, went to the Flash .FLA Files gallery and downloaded one at random.
I got a .fla file of about 1MB.

I went to Sysinternals's site to get the latest version of Strings, a command line tool to extract plain text strings from binary files.
Ran:

strings -n 10 "D:\Archives\scrolling flash gallery with preloader.fla" > str

Got at text file with lot of data you have to sort yourself...

There are some other similar freewares utilities, some with GUI, but this command line version is handy. Works with both (or either) Unicode and Ansi strings.

Oh, obviously it is for Windows. You forgot to specify if you target a specific platform.

PS.: for what it is worth, I believe the Flash SDK is free at Adobe's site. You just don't have the Flash IDE, only a compiler, etc. for AS development. Perhaps it includes a tool to look at .fla files (not tried the toolkit yet).

Answer 2

FLA is a proprietary Adobe format, it is not publicly documented.

I think only the container details are known. FLA container until CS4 is Microsoft Structured Storage (like MS Word documents), and starting from CS5 is simply ZIP. CS4 version can be opened with for example FAR Manager or OpenMCDF. CS5+ version can be opened with e.g. 7zip.

You'll see the binary Contents and other objects. AS3 code can be seen inside those in Unicode plaintext. But other elements are not so easily extractable.

Answer 3

There are some free libraries too that offer ways to extra content of SWF files (i.e. sswf). However, much less from .fla files since the format of the .fla files is proprietary.