...one of the most highly
regarded and expertly designed C++ library projects in the
world.
— Herb Sutter and Andrei
Alexandrescu, C++
Coding Standards
Directly opening a wallet.dat in a text editor is futile, as it is binary data. Analysts use Linux-based forensics tools or Python libraries. The standard tool is wallet2john.py (part of the John the Ripper suite), or bit2john for newer wallets.