You can use 'gcore' (from gdb) to dump the process memory (on Linux) - it tries to create a core file as if it crashed, without crashing it. It's not 100% reliable it sometimes fails - not entirely sure why - but often works.

Then as above you dont really need to understand the memory or variables with debug symbols (though on Linux they generally are available.. and increasingly on the newest distros will automatically be downloaded by debuginfod). You can jsut grep for the text you are looking for and likely it's roughly together in memory.