Book Image

Python for Secret Agents - Volume II - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Python for Secret Agents - Volume II - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Python is easy to learn and extensible programming language that allows any manner of secret agent to work with a variety of data. Agents from beginners to seasoned veterans will benefit from Python's simplicity and sophistication. The standard library provides numerous packages that move beyond simple beginner missions. The Python ecosystem of related packages and libraries supports deep information processing. This book will guide you through the process of upgrading your Python-based toolset for intelligence gathering, analysis, and communication. You'll explore the ways Python is used to analyze web logs to discover the trails of activities that can be found in web and database servers. We'll also look at how we can use Python to discover details of the social network by looking at the data available from social networking websites. Finally, you'll see how to extract history from PDF files, which opens up new sources of data, and you’ll learn about the ways you can gather data using an Arduino-based sensor device.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)
6
Index

Extracting PDF content


In Chapter 1, New Missions – New Tools, we installed PDF Miner 3K to parse PDF files. It's time to see how this tool works. Here's the link to the documentation for this package: http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/python/pdfminer/index.html. This link is not obvious from the PyPI page, or from the BitBucket site that contains the software. An agent who scans the docs/index.html will see this reference.

In order to see how we use this package, visit http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/python/pdfminer/programming.html. This has an important diagram that shows how the various classes interact to represent the complex internal details of a PDF document. For some helpful insight, visit http://denis.papathanasiou.org/2010/08/04/extracting-text-images-from-pdf-files/.

A PDF document is a sequence of physical pages. Each page has boxes of text (in addition to images and line graphics). Each textbox contains lines of text and each line contains the individual characters. Each of these...