Question

I have a .dex file, call it classes.dex.

Is there a way to “read” the contents of that classes.dex and get a list of all classes in there as full class names, including their package, com.mypackage.mysubpackage.MyClass, for exmaple?

I was thinking about com.android.dx.dex.file.DexFile, but I cannot seem to find a method for retrieving an entire set of classes.

Answer 1

You can use the dexlib2 library as a standalone library (available in maven), to read the dex file and get a list of classes.

DexFile dexFile = DexFileFactory.loadDexFile("classes.dex", 19 /*api level*/);
for (ClassDef classDef: dexFile.getClasses()) {
    System.out.println(classDef.getType());
}

Note that the class names will be of the form “Ljava/lang/String;”, which is how they are stored in the dex file (and in a java class file). To convert, just remove the first and last letter, and replace / with .