How to extract a large number of private keys from Pywallet txt file dump

[HedAix]

Applying pywallet's dumpwallet command to my 2013 wallet.dat file to produce a text file yields hundreds of addr, pubbkey, reserve and sec paragraphs. I tried to pick some of the "sec" listings (which i understand are the private keys) at random and sweep them into electrum but only get a "no inputs found" error message which I assume means that the private key is invalid or contains no bitcoin. is there a clever way to find the private keys that contain bitcoin or to extract all the private keys from the text file? Or have I got the whole sweep concept completely wrong? I've checked the "defaultkey" which i understand is the master public key to confirm that the wallet still contains some bitcoin so know that there is a (very modest) amount of value locked away in it. TIA! 

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[TheArchaeologist]

I you have a list of addresses to share for which you want to check the balance, please post them here and I will check them (automated) for you.

Please note: not asking for the entire file, public addresses only.

[HedAix]

I you have a list of addresses to share for which you want to check the balance, please post them here and I will check them (automated) for you.

Please note: not asking for the entire file, public addresses only.

Thanks for the offer. however extracting all the public keys represents the same problem for me. There are too many to manually extract and copy. I need a way of going through the text file and pulling out all the private keys so I can paste them en masse into the sweep field in Electrum. Any thoughts as to how I can do that?

[TheArchaeologist]

Thanks for the offer. however extracting all the public keys represents the same problem for me. There are too many to manually extract and copy. I need a way of going through the text file and pulling out all the private keys so I can paste them en masse into the sweep field in Electrum. Any thoughts as to how I can do that?

Kind of depends if you can do any programming yourself or not. You could create a simple python script that will read the file line by line and extract the public key for those lines there is one present. Then in the end you could wite all found keys to a single file. I'm not aware of the structure of the file you got so my suggestions are kind of general. Anyway creating such a script shouldn't take much time.

[PawGo]

Check that answer (and others, topic is similar to yours):
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/41319

[HedAix]

Unfortunately I am not a programmer, TheArchaeologist, so creating a script is beyond my ability. I was hoping there was an automated way someone had already created but it seems not.

Thanks for the link, PawGo. I did read that thread when i did my original research but it didn't have an obvious solution (most answers had downvotes) and, besides, the issue the OP had in that thread was a little different to mine (my issue is being able to mine the txt file to copy all private keys, his was about how to get the text file in the first place for multiple wallets).

[LoyceV]

Unfortunately I am not a programmer, TheArchaeologist, so creating a script is beyond my ability. I was hoping there was an automated way someone had already created but it seems not.

If it's only "hundreds", it shouldn't take too long to do it manually. I would for sure prefer to spend 30 minutes copying keys over trusting a program some random person gives you.
Note that clipboard malware can steal your keys, so make sure your computer is clean (or better: offline).

[HedAix]

Actually I worked out a simple way to do it. I imported the txt file into Excel then ran some functions to search for the sec entries (using ISNUMBER for those that are interested) then sorted the entries to list the sec cells together before cleaning the data of non key text using find/replace. Copied the cleaned up keys into electrum and voila, the bitcoin-containing keys were registered.