How can I retrieve to and from address in transaction directly from blockchain

Question

I'm trying to get a list of addresses that have made transactions with a given bitcoin address.
I've got a lot of addresses so a web based blockchain explorer like blockchain.info isn't practical. I've downloaded the blockchain and used bitcoin-abe to dump it into a sqlite database. However I'm not finding addresses anywhere. Are the actual addresses called something different in the blockchain?

Answer 1

The spending conditions, i.e., who is able to spend a given output, are encoded as scripts in the output. What is commonly referred to as a Bitcoin address is little more than a default script format (either pay-to-pubkey or pay-to-pubkey-hash) which require a signature from a private key matching the pubkey in the script.

ABE stores the output scripts, but appears not to create an index for the addresses. So you probably want to convert the addresses that you're looking for into the script version (see the wiki for details on how to extract the pubkey hash or pubkey from the address). Once you have the pubkey hash or pubkey you construct a binary script similar to this (hexencoded)You should then be able to search for these in the database ABE gives you.