netrc — netrc file processing¶

Source code: Lib/netrc.py

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 – as determined by os.path.expanduser() – will be read. Otherwise, a FileNotFoundError exception will be raised. Parse errors will raise NetrcParseError with diagnostic information including the file name, line number, and terminating token.

If no argument is specified on a POSIX system, the presence of passwords in the .netrc file will raise a NetrcParseError if the file ownership or permissions are insecure (owned by a user other than the user running the process, or accessible for read or write by any other user). This implements security behavior equivalent to that of ftp and other programs that use .netrc. Such security checks are not available on platforms that do not support os.getuid().

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 when file is not passed as argument.

Changed in version 3.10: netrc try UTF-8 encoding before using locale specific encoding. The entry in the netrc file no longer needs to contain all tokens. The missing tokens’ value default to an empty string. All the tokens and their values now can contain arbitrary characters, like whitespace and non-ASCII characters. If the login name is anonymous, it won’t trigger the security check.

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¶

Textual explanation of the error.

filename¶

The name of the source file.

lineno¶

The line number on which the error was found.