netrc — netrc file processing

Source code:Lib/netrc.py

Thenetrc class parses and encapsulates the netrc file format used bythe Unixftp program and other FTP clients.

classnetrc.netrc([file])

Anetrc instance or subclass instance encapsulates data from a netrcfile. The initialization argument, if present, specifies the file to parse. Ifno argument is given, the file.netrc in the user’s home directory –as determined byos.path.expanduser() – will be read. Otherwise,aFileNotFoundError exception will be raised.Parse errors will raiseNetrcParseError with diagnosticinformation including the file name, line number, and terminating token.If no argument is specified on a POSIX system, the presence of passwords inthe.netrc file will raise aNetrcParseError if the fileownership or permissions are insecure (owned by a user other than the userrunning the process, or accessible for read or write by any other user).This implements security behavior equivalent to that of ftp and otherprograms that use.netrc.

Changed in version 3.4:Added the POSIX permission check.

Changed in version 3.7:os.path.expanduser() is used to find the location of the.netrc file whenfile is not passed as argument.

exceptionnetrc.NetrcParseError

Exception raised by thenetrc class when syntactical errors areencountered in source text. Instances of this exception provide threeinteresting attributes:msg is a textual explanation of the error,filename is the name of the source file, andlineno gives theline number on which the error was found.

netrc Objects

Anetrc instance has the following methods:

netrc.authenticators(host)

Return a 3-tuple(login,account,password) of authenticators forhost.If the netrc file did not contain an entry for the given host, return the tupleassociated with the ‘default’ entry. If neither matching host nor default entryis available, returnNone.

netrc.__repr__()

Dump the class data as a string in the format of a netrc file. (This discardscomments and may reorder the entries.)

Instances ofnetrc 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. All ASCIIpunctuation is allowed in passwords, however, note that whitespace andnon-printable characters are not allowed in passwords. This is a limitationof the way the .netrc file is parsed and may be removed in the future.