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

IndentationError


An IndentationError occurs most frequently when indenting code with a mixture of spaces or tabs. It is preferred to indent your code with four spaces rather than a tab character. You can check for tabs and spaces in most text editors by showing all symbols or run the -tt flag with Python to identify troublesome lines (that is, if you're script doesn't report the exception in the first place). Once you select an editor of your liking, be sure to configure it to uniformly place spacing throughout your script.

Another common source of this error is failing to match the appropriate indentation level within your script. For example, in lengthier code segments you might mistakenly indent some line of code with too few spaces or tabs:

>>> def indentation():
...     print 'Good indentation'
...  print 'Bad indentation'
  File "<stdin>", line 3
    print "Bad indentation"
              ^
IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation
 level