Indexing actually provides the investigator have a complete look at a file and gather potential evidence from it. The evidence could be contained within a file, a disk image, a memory snapshot, or a network trace.

Indexing helps in reducing time for time-consuming tasks such as keyword searching. Forensic investigation also involves interactive searching phase, where the index is used to rapidly locate keywords.

Indexing also helps in listing the keywords in a sorted list.

Example

The following example shows how you can use indexing in Python.

aList = [123, ''sample'', ''zara'', ''indexing''];

print "Index for sample : ", aList.index(''sample'')
print "Index for indexing : ", aList.index(''indexing'')

str1 = "This is sample message for forensic investigation indexing";
str2 = "sample";

print "Index of the character keyword found is " 
print str1.index(str2)

The above script will produce the following output.