Now that we are all set up with our VirtualBox image, let's have a look at a simple Python script that will help us to call Nmap and initiate a scan. Later on, we will optimize this script to make it better. We will finish by making it a full-fledged port scanning Python engine with pause, resume, and multiprocessing abilities:

The information produced by the preceding script is hard for the Python code to filter and store. If we want to store all the open ports and services in a dictionary, it would be hard to do that with the preceding method. Let's think about another way in which the information produced can be parsed and processed by the script. We know that the oX flag is used to produce output in XML format. We will use the oX flag to convert the XML string to a Python dictionary as shown in the following sections.