I need to replicate the ascii portion of what the

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb897439.aspx

strings.exe program does. From the description of the file it says, "Search for ANSI and UNICODE strings in binary images." I'm not entirely sure what I'm even supposed to be doing. Does this program read in an image (convert the image to something...?) and then search for ascii sequences within whatever it converted the image to?