Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics

By : Chapin Bryce
Book Image

Learning Python for Forensics

By: Chapin Bryce

Overview of this book

This book will illustrate how and why you should learn Python to strengthen your analysis skills and efficiency as you creatively solve real-world problems through instruction-based tutorials. The tutorials use an interactive design, giving you experience of the development process so you gain a better understanding of what it means to be a forensic developer. Each chapter walks you through a forensic artifact and one or more methods to analyze the evidence. It also provides reasons why one method may be advantageous over another. We cover common digital forensics and incident response scenarios, with scripts that can be used to tackle case work in the field. Using built-in and community-sourced libraries, you will improve your problem solving skills with the addition of the Python scripting language. In addition, we provide resources for further exploration of each script so you can understand what further purposes Python can serve. With this knowledge, you can rapidly develop and deploy solutions to identify critical information and fine-tune your skill set as an examiner.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Learning Python for Forensics
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating spreadsheets with the xlsxwriter module


Xlsxwriter (version 0.7.6) is a useful third-party module that writes the Excel output. There are a plethora of Excel-supported modules for Python, but we chose this module because it was highly robust and well-documented. As the name suggests, this module can only be used to write Excel spreadsheets. The xlsxwriter module supports cell and conditional formatting, charts, tables, filters, and macros among others. This module can be installed with pip:

pip install xlsxwriter

Adding data to a spreadsheet

Let's quickly create a script named simplexlsx.v1.py for this example. On lines 1 and 2, we import the xlsxwriter and datetime modules. The data we are going to be plotting, including the header column, is stored as nested lists in the school_data variable. Each list is a row of information we will want to store in the output Excel sheet, with the first element containing the column names:

001 import xlsxwriter
002 from datetime import datetime...