netrc — netrc file processing
New in version 1.5.2.
The netrc class parses and encapsulates the netrc file format used by
the Unix ftp program and other FTP clients.
-
class netrc.netrc([file])
- A netrc instance or subclass instance encapsulates data from a netrc
file. The initialization argument, if present, specifies the file to parse. If
no argument is given, the file .netrc in the user’s home directory will
be read. Parse errors will raise NetrcParseError with diagnostic
information including the file name, line number, and terminating token.
-
exception netrc.NetrcParseError
- Exception raised by the netrc class when syntactical errors are
encountered in source text. Instances of this exception provide three
interesting attributes: msg is a textual explanation of the error,
filename is the name of the source file, and lineno gives the
line number on which the error was found.
netrc Objects
A netrc instance has the following methods:
-
netrc.authenticators(host)
- Return a 3-tuple (login, account, password) of authenticators for host.
If the netrc file did not contain an entry for the given host, return the tuple
associated with the ‘default’ entry. If neither matching host nor default entry
is available, return None.
-
netrc.__repr__()
- Dump the class data as a string in the format of a netrc file. (This discards
comments and may reorder the entries.)
Instances of netrc have public instance variables:
-
netrc.hosts
- Dictionary mapping host names to (login, account, password) tuples. The
‘default’ entry, if any, is represented as a pseudo-host by that name.
-
netrc.macros
- Dictionary mapping macro names to string lists.
Note
Passwords are limited to a subset of the ASCII character set. Versions of
this module prior to 2.3 were extremely limited. Starting with 2.3, all
ASCII punctuation is allowed in passwords. However, note that whitespace and
non-printable characters are not allowed in passwords. This is a limitation
of the way the .netrc file is parsed and may be removed in the future.