Pylint Documentation

Release 2.4.4

Logilab, PyCQA and contributors

Nov 21, 2019

Contents

1 Introduction 3
1.1 What is Pylint? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2 What Pylint is not? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2 Tutorial 5
2.1 Intro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2 Getting Started . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.3 Your First Pylint’ing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.4 The Next Step . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

3 User Guide 11
3.1 Installation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.2 Running Pylint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.3 Pylint output . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.4 Messages control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3.5 Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.6 Editor and IDE integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

4 How To Guides 27
4.1 How to Write a Checker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
4.2 How To Write a Pylint Plugin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
4.3 Transform plugins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

5 Technical Reference 35
5.1 Startup and the Linter Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
5.2 Checkers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
5.3 Optional Pylint checkers in the extensions module . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
5.4 Pylint features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
5.5 Pylint and C extensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

6 Development 73
6.1 Contributing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

7 Frequently Asked Questions 77

7.1 1. About Pylint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
7.2 2. Installation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
7.3 3. Running Pylint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

i
7.4 4. Message Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
7.5 5. Classes and Inheritance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
7.6 6. Troubleshooting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

8 Some projects using Pylint 81

9 Support 83

10 What’s New in Pylint 85

10.1 What’s New in Pylint 2.4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
10.2 What’s New in Pylint 2.3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
10.3 What’s New in Pylint 2.2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
10.4 What’s New in Pylint 2.1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
10.5 What’s New in Pylint 2.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
10.6 What’s New In Pylint 1.9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
10.7 What’s New In Pylint 1.8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
10.8 What’s New In Pylint 1.7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
10.9 What’s New In Pylint 1.6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
10.10 Pylint’s ChangeLog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

Index 179

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

Pylint is a tool that checks for errors in Python code, tries to enforce a coding standard and looks for code smells. It
can also look for certain type errors, it can recommend suggestions about how particular blocks can be refactored and
can offer you details about the code’s complexity.

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2 Contents
CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1 What is Pylint?

Pylint is a tool that checks for errors in Python code, tries to enforce a coding standard and looks for code smells. It
can also look for certain type errors, it can recommend suggestions about how particular blocks can be refactored and
can offer you details about the code’s complexity.
Other similar projects would include pychecker (now defunct), pyflakes, flake8, and mypy. The default coding style
used by Pylint is close to PEP 8.
Pylint will display a number of messages as it analyzes the code and it can also be used for displaying some statistics
about the number of warnings and errors found in different files. The messages are classified under various categories
such as errors and warnings.
Last but not least, the code is given an overall mark, based on the number and severity of the warnings and errors.

1.2 What Pylint is not?

What Pylint says is not to be taken as gospel and Pylint isn’t smarter than you are: it may warn you about things that
you have conscientiously done.
Pylint tries hard to report as few false positives as possible for errors, but it may be too verbose with warnings. That’s
for example because it tries to detect things that may be dangerous in a context, but are not in others, or because it
checks for some things that you don’t care about. Generally, you shouldn’t expect Pylint to be totally quiet about your
code, so don’t necessarily be alarmed if it gives you a hell lot of messages for your project!
The best way to tackle pylint’s verboseness is to:
• enable or disable the messages or message categories that you want to be activated or not for when pylint
is analyzing your code. This can be done easily through a command line flag. For instance, disabling all
convention messages is simple as a --disable=C option added to pylint command.
• create a custom configuration file, tailored to your needs. You can generate one using pylint’s command
--generate-rcfile.

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4 Chapter 1. Introduction
CHAPTER 2

Tutorial

Author Robert Kirkpatrick

2.1 Intro

Beginner to coding standards? Pylint can be your guide to reveal what’s really going on behind the scenes and help
you to become a more aware programmer.
Sharing code is a rewarding endeavor. Putting your code out there can be either an act of philanthropy, coming
of age, or a basic extension of belief in open source. Whatever the motivation, your good intentions may not have
the desired outcome if people find your code hard to use or understand. The Python community has formalized some
recommended programming styles to help everyone write code in a common, agreed-upon style that makes the most
sense for shared code. This style is captured in PEP 8, the "Style Guide for Python Code". Pylint can be a quick and
easy way of seeing if your code has captured the essence of PEP 8 and is therefore friendly to other potential users.
Perhaps you’re not ready to share your code but you’d like to learn a bit more about writing better code and don’t know
where to start. Pylint can tell you where you may have run astray and point you in the direction to figure out what you
have done and how to do better.
This tutorial is all about approaching coding standards with little or no knowledge of in-depth programming or the
code standards themselves. It’s the equivalent of skipping the manual and jumping right in.
My command line prompt for these examples is:

robertk01 Desktop$

2.2 Getting Started

Running Pylint with no arguments will invoke the help dialogue and give you an idea of the arguments available to
you. Do that now, i.e.:

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robertk01 Desktop$ pylint

...
a bunch of stuff
...

A couple of the options that we’ll focus on here are:

Commands:
--help-msg=<msg-id>
--generate-rcfile
Messages control:
--disable=<msg-ids>
Reports:
--reports=<y_or_n>
--output-format=<format>

If you need more detail, you can also ask for an even longer help message, like so:
robertk01 Desktop$ pylint --long-help
...
Even more stuff
...

Pay attention to the last bit of this longer help output. This gives you a hint of what Pylint is going to pick on:
Output:
Using the default text output, the message format is :
MESSAGE_TYPE: LINE_NUM:[OBJECT:] MESSAGE
There are 5 kind of message types :
* (C) convention, for programming standard violation
* (R) refactor, for bad code smell
* (W) warning, for python specific problems
* (E) error, for probable bugs in the code
* (F) fatal, if an error occurred which prevented pylint from doing
further processing.

When Pylint is first run on a fresh piece of code, a common complaint is that it is too noisy. The current default
configuration is set to enforce all possible warnings. We’ll use some of the options I noted above to make it suit your
preferences a bit better (and thus make it emit messages only when needed).

2.3 Your First Pylint’ing

We’ll use a basic Python script as fodder for our tutorial. The starting code we will use is called simplecaeser.py and
is here in its entirety:
1 #!/usr/bin/env python3
2
3 import string
4
5 shift = 3
6 choice = input("would you like to encode or decode?")
7 word = input("Please enter text")
8 letters = string.ascii_letters + string.punctuation + string.digits
9 encoded = ''
10 if choice == "encode":
(continues on next page)

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(continued from previous page)

11 for letter in word:
12 if letter == ' ':
13 encoded = encoded + ' '
14 else:
15 x = letters.index(letter) + shift
16 encoded=encoded + letters[x]
17 if choice == "decode":
18 for letter in word:
19 if letter == ' ':
20 encoded = encoded + ' '
21 else:
22 x = letters.index(letter) - shift
23 encoded = encoded + letters[x]
24
25 print(encoded)

Let’s get started.

If we run this:

robertk01 Desktop$ pylint simplecaeser.py

************* Module simplecaesar
simplecaesar.py:16:19: C0326: Exactly one space required around assignment
encoded=encoded + letters[x]
^ (bad-whitespace)
simplecaesar.py:1:0: C0111: Missing module docstring (missing-docstring)
simplecaesar.py:5:0: C0103: Constant name "shift" doesn't conform to UPPER_CASE
˓→naming style (invalid-name)

simplecaesar.py:6:0: C0103: Constant name "choice" doesn't conform to UPPER_CASE

˓→naming style (invalid-name)

simplecaesar.py:7:0: C0103: Constant name "word" doesn't conform to UPPER_CASE naming

˓→style (invalid-name)

simplecaesar.py:8:0: C0103: Constant name "letters" doesn't conform to UPPER_CASE

˓→naming style (invalid-name)

simplecaesar.py:9:0: C0103: Constant name "encoded" doesn't conform to UPPER_CASE

˓→naming style (invalid-name)

-----------------------------------
Your code has been rated at 6.32/10

Previous experience taught me that the default output for the messages needed a bit more info. We can see the second
line is:

"simplecaesar.py:1:0: C0111: Missing module docstring (missing-docstring)"

This basically means that line 1 violates a convention C0111. It’s telling me I really should have a docstring. I agree,
but what if I didn’t fully understand what rule I violated. Knowing only that I violated a convention isn’t much help
if I’m a newbie. Another piece of information there is the message symbol between parens, missing-docstring
here.
If I want to read up a bit more about that, I can go back to the command line and try this:

robertk01 Desktop$ pylint --help-msg=missing-docstring

:missing-docstring (C0111): *Missing %s docstring*
Used when a module, function, class or method has no docstring. Some special
methods like __init__ don't necessarily require a docstring. This message
belongs to the basic checker.

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Yeah, ok. That one was a bit of a no-brainer, but I have run into error messages that left me with no clue about what
went wrong, simply because I was unfamiliar with the underlying mechanism of code theory. One error that puzzled
my newbie mind was:
:too-many-instance-attributes (R0902): *Too many instance attributes (%s/%s)*

I get it now thanks to Pylint pointing it out to me. If you don’t get that one, pour a fresh cup of coffee and look into it
- let your programmer mind grow!

2.4 The Next Step

Now that we got some configuration stuff out of the way, let’s see what we can do with the remaining warnings.
If we add a docstring to describe what the code is meant to do that will help. There are 5 invalid-name messages
that we will get to later. Lastly, I violated the convention of using spaces around an operator such as = so I’ll fix that
too. To sum up, I’ll add a docstring to line 2, and put spaces around the = sign on line 16.
Here is the updated code:
1 #!/usr/bin/env python3
2 """This script prompts a user to enter a message to encode or decode
3 using a classic Caeser shift substitution (3 letter shift)"""
4
5 import string
6
7 shift = 3
8 choice = input("would you like to encode or decode?")
9 word = input("Please enter text")
10 letters = string.ascii_letters + string.punctuation + string.digits
11 encoded = ''
12 if choice == "encode":
13 for letter in word:
14 if letter == ' ':
15 encoded = encoded + ' '
16 else:
17 x = letters.index(letter) + shift
18 encoded = encoded + letters[x]
19 if choice == "decode":
20 for letter in word:
21 if letter == ' ':
22 encoded = encoded + ' '
23 else:
24 x = letters.index(letter) - shift
25 encoded = encoded + letters[x]
26
27 print(encoded)

Here is what happens when we run it:

robertk01 Desktop$ pylint simplecaeser.py
************* Module simplecaesar
simplecaesar.py:7:0: C0103: Constant name "shift" doesn't conform to UPPER_CASE
˓→naming style (invalid-name)

simplecaesar.py:8:0: C0103: Constant name "choice" doesn't conform to UPPER_CASE

˓→naming style (invalid-name)

simplecaesar.py:9:0: C0103: Constant name "word" doesn't conform to UPPER_CASE naming

˓→style (invalid-name)
(continues on next page)

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(continued from previous page)

simplecaesar.py:10:0: C0103: Constant name "letters" doesn't conform to UPPER_CASE
˓→naming style (invalid-name)

simplecaesar.py:11:0: C0103: Constant name "encoded" doesn't conform to UPPER_CASE

˓→naming style (invalid-name)

------------------------------------------------------------------
Your code has been rated at 7.37/10 (previous run: 6.32/10, +1.05)

Nice! Pylint told us how much our code rating has improved since our last run, and we’re down to just the
invalid-name messages.
There are fairly well defined conventions around naming things like instance variables, functions, classes, etc. The
conventions focus on the use of UPPERCASE and lowercase as well as the characters that separate multiple words
in the name. This lends itself well to checking via a regular expression, thus the should match (([A-Z_][A-Z1-
9_]*)|(__.*__))$.
In this case Pylint is telling me that those variables appear to be constants and should be all UPPERCASE. This is
an in-house convention that has lived with Pylint since its inception. You too can create your own in-house naming
conventions but for the purpose of this tutorial, we want to stick to the PEP 8 standard. In this case, the variables I
declared should follow the convention of all lowercase. The appropriate rule would be something like: "should match
[a-z_][a-z0-9_]{2,30}$". Notice the lowercase letters in the regular expression (a-z versus A-Z).
If we run that rule using a --const-rgx='[a-z\_][a-z0-9\_]{2,30}$' option, it will now be quite quiet:

robertk01 Desktop$ pylint --const-rgx='[a-z_][a-z0-9_]{2,30}$' simplecaesar.py

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Your code has been rated at 10.00/10 (previous run: 7.37/10, +2.63)

Regular expressions can be quite a beast so take my word on this particular example but go ahead and read up on them
if you want.

Tip: It would really be a pain to specify that regex on the command line all the time, particularly if we’re using many
other options. That’s what a configuration file is for. We can configure our Pylint to store our options for us so we
don’t have to declare them on the command line. Using a configuration file is a nice way of formalizing your rules and
quickly sharing them with others. Invoking pylint --generate-rcfile will create a sample rcfile with all the
options set and explained in comments.

That’s it for the basic intro. More tutorials will follow.

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10 Chapter 2. Tutorial
CHAPTER 3

User Guide

3.1 Installation

3.1.1 Python packages

Pylint should be easily installable using pip.

pip install pylint

3.1.2 Source distribution installation

From the source distribution, extract the tarball, go to the extracted directory and simply run

python setup.py install

Or you can install it in editable mode, using

python setup.py develop

3.2 Running Pylint

3.2.1 Invoking Pylint

Pylint is meant to be called from the command line. The usage is

pylint [options] modules_or_packages

You should give Pylint the name of a python package or module, or some number of packages or modules. Pylint
will not import this package or module, though uses Python internals to locate them and as such is subject

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to the same rules and configuration. You should pay attention to your PYTHONPATH, since it is a common error to
analyze an installed version of a module instead of the development version.
It is also possible to analyze Python files, with a few restrictions. The thing to keep in mind is that Pylint will try to
convert the file name to a module name, and only be able to process the file if it succeeds.

pylint mymodule.py

should always work since the current working directory is automatically added on top of the python path

pylint directory/mymodule.py

will work if directory is a python package (i.e. has an __init__.py file or it is an implicit namespace package) or
if "directory" is in the python path.
For more details on this see the Frequently Asked Questions.
It is also possible to call Pylint from another Python program, thanks to the Run() function in the pylint.lint
module (assuming Pylint options are stored in a list of strings pylint_options) as:

import pylint.lint
pylint_opts = ['--version']
pylint.lint.Run(pylint_opts)

To silently run Pylint on a module_name.py module, and get its standard output and error:

from pylint import epylint as lint

(pylint_stdout, pylint_stderr) = lint.py_run('module_name.py', return_std=True)

3.2.2 Command line options

First of all, we have two basic (but useful) options.

--version show program’s version number and exit
-h, --help show help about the command line options
Pylint is architected around several checkers. You can disable a specific checker or some of its messages or message
categories by specifying --disable=<symbol>. If you want to enable only some checkers or some message
symbols, first use --disable=all then --enable=<symbol> with <symbol> being a comma-separated list
of checker names and message symbols. See the list of available features for a description of provided checkers
with their functionalities. The --disable and --enable options can be used with comma-separated lists mixing
checkers, message ids and categories like -d C,W,no-error,design
It is possible to disable all messages with --disable=all. This is useful to enable only a few checkers or a few
messages by first disabling everything, and then re-enabling only what you need.
Each checker has some specific options, which can take either a yes/no value, an integer, a python regular expression,
or a comma-separated list of values (which are generally used to override a regular expression in special cases). For a
full list of options, use --help
Specifying all the options suitable for your setup and coding standards can be tedious, so it is possible to use a
configuration file to specify the default values. You can specify a configuration file on the command line using the
--rcfile option. Otherwise, Pylint searches for a configuration file in the following order and uses the first one it
finds:
1. pylintrc in the current working directory
2. .pylintrc in the current working directory

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3. If the current working directory is in a Python module, Pylint searches up the hierarchy of Python modules until
it finds a pylintrc file. This allows you to specify coding standards on a module-by-module basis. Of course,
a directory is judged to be a Python module if it contains an __init__.py file.
4. The file named by environment variable PYLINTRC
5. if you have a home directory which isn’t /root:
1. .pylintrc in your home directory
2. .config/pylintrc in your home directory
6. /etc/pylintrc
The --generate-rcfile option will generate a commented configuration file on standard output according to the
current configuration and exit. This includes:
• Any configuration file found as explained above
• Options appearing before --generate-rcfile on the Pylint command line
Of course you can also start with the default values and hand-tune the configuration.
Other useful global options include:
--ignore=<file[,file...]> Add files or directories to the blacklist. They should be base names, not paths.
--output-format=<format> Select output format (text, json, custom).
--msg-template=<template> Modify text output message template.
--list-msgs Generate pylint’s messages.
--list-msgs-enabled Display a list of what messages are enabled and disabled with the given configu-
ration.
--full-documentation Generate pylint’s full documentation, in reST format.

3.2.3 Parallel execution

It is possible to speed up the execution of Pylint. If the running computer has more CPUs than one, then the work for
checking all files could be spread across all cores via Pylints’s sub-processes. This functionality is exposed via the -j
command-line parameter. If the provided number is 0, then the total number of CPUs will be autodetected and used.
Example:

pylint -j 4 mymodule1.py mymodule2.py mymodule3.py mymodule4.py

This will spawn 4 parallel Pylint sub-process, where each provided module will be checked in parallel. Discovered
problems by checkers are not displayed immediately. They are shown just after checking a module is complete.
There are some limitations in running checks in parallel in the current implementation. It is not possible to use custom
plugins (i.e. --load-plugins option), nor it is not possible to use initialization hooks (i.e. the --init-hook
option).

3.2.4 Exit codes

Pylint returns bit-encoded exit codes. If applicable, the table below lists the related stderr stream message output.

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exit code meaning stderr stream message

0 no error
1 fatal message issued
2 error message issued
4 warning message issued
8 refactor message issued
16 convention message issued
32 usage error
• "internal error while receiving
resultsfrom child linter" "Er-
ror occurred, stopping the lin-
ter."
• "<return of linter.help()>"
• "Jobs number <#> should be
greater than 0"

3.3 Pylint output

The default format for the output is raw text. You can change this by passing pylint the
--output-format=<value> option. Possible values are: json, parseable, colorized and msvs (visual
studio).
Moreover you can customize the exact way information are displayed using the –msg-template=<format string>
option. The format string uses the Python new format syntax and the following fields are available :
path relative path to the file
abspath absolute path to the file
line line number
column column number
module module name
obj object within the module (if any)
msg text of the message
msg_id the message code (eg. I0011)
symbol symbolic name of the message (eg. locally-disabled)
C one letter indication of the message category
category fullname of the message category
For example, the former (pre 1.0) default format can be obtained with:

pylint --msg-template='{msg_id}:{line:3d},{column}: {obj}: {msg}'

A few other examples:

• the default format:

{path}:{line}:{column}: {msg_id}: {msg} ({symbol})

• Visual Studio compatible format (former ’msvs’ output format):

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{path}({line}): [{msg_id}{obj}] {msg}

• Parseable (Emacs and all, former ’parseable’ output format) format:

{path}:{line}: [{msg_id}({symbol}), {obj}] {msg}

3.3.1 Source code analysis section

For each python module, Pylint will first display a few ’*’ characters followed by the name of the module. Then, a
number of messages with the following format:

MESSAGE_TYPE: LINE_NUM:[OBJECT:] MESSAGE

You can get another output format, useful since it’s recognized by most editors or other development tools using the
--output-format=parseable option.
The message type can be:
• [I]nformational messages that Pylint emits (do not contribute to your analysis score)
• [R]efactor for a "good practice" metric violation
• [C]onvention for coding standard violation
• [W]arning for stylistic problems, or minor programming issues
• [E]rror for important programming issues (i.e. most probably bug)
• [F]atal for errors which prevented further processing
Sometimes the line of code which caused the error is displayed with a caret pointing to the error. This may be
generalized in future versions of Pylint.
Example (extracted from a run of Pylint on itself...):

************* Module pylint.checkers.format

W: 50: Too long line (86/80)
W:108: Operator not followed by a space
print >>sys.stderr, 'Unable to match %r', line
^
W:141: Too long line (81/80)
W: 74:searchall: Unreachable code
W:171:FormatChecker.process_tokens: Redefining built-in (type)
W:150:FormatChecker.process_tokens: Too many local variables (20/15)
W:150:FormatChecker.process_tokens: Too many branches (13/12)

3.3.2 Reports section

Following the analysis message, Pylint can display a set of reports, each one focusing on a particular aspect of the
project, such as number of messages by categories, modules dependencies. These features can be enabled through the
--reports=y option, or its shorthand version -rn.
For instance, the metrics report displays summaries gathered from the current run.
• the number of processed modules
• for each module, the percentage of errors and warnings
• the total number of errors and warnings

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• percentage of classes, functions and modules with docstrings, and a comparison from the previous run
• percentage of classes, functions and modules with correct name (according to the coding standard), and a com-
parison from the previous run
• a list of external dependencies found in the code, and where they appear

3.3.3 Score section

Finally, Pylint displays a global evaluation score for the code, rated out of a maximum score of 10.0. This output can
be suppressed through the --score=n option, or its shorthand version -sn.
The evaluation formula can be overridden with the --evaluation=<python_expression> option.

3.4 Messages control

pylint has an advanced message control for its checks, offering the ability to enable / disable a message either from
the command line or from the configuration file, as well as from the code itself.
For all of these controls, pylint accepts the following values:
• a symbolic message: no-member, undefined-variable etc.
• a numerical ID: E1101, E1102 etc.
• The name of the group of checks. You can grab those with pylint --list-groups. For example, you can
disable / enable all the checks related to type checking, with typecheck or all the checks related to variables
with variables
• Corresponding category of the checks
– C convention related checks
– R refactoring related checks
– W various warnings
– E errors, for probable bugs in the code
– F fatal, if an error occurred which prevented pylint from doing further processing.
• All the checks with all

3.4.1 Block disables

This describes how the pragma controls operate at a code level.

The pragma controls can disable / enable:
• All the violations on a single line

a, b = ... # pylint: disable=unbalanced-tuple-unpacking

• All the violations in a single scope

def test():
# Disable all the no-member violations in this function
# pylint: disable=no-member
...

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• All the violations in a block. For instance, each separate branch of an if statement is considered a separate
block, as in the following example:
def meth5(self):
# pylint: disable=no-member
# no error
print(self.bla)
if self.blop:
# pylint: enable=no-member
# disable all no-members for this block
print(self.blip)
else:
# This is affected by the scope disable
print(self.blip)
# pylint: enable=no-member
print(self.blip)
if self.blop:
# pylint: enable=no-member
# disable all no-members for this block
print(self.blip)
else:
# This emits a violation
print(self.blip)

• If the violation occurs on a block starting line, then it applies only to that line
if self.blop: # pylint: disable=no-member; applies only to this line
# Here we get an error
print(self.blip)
else:
# error
print(self.blip)

Here’s an example with all these rules in a single place:

"""pylint option block-disable"""

__revision__ = None

class Foo(object):
"""block-disable test"""

def __init__(self):
pass

def meth1(self, arg):

"""this issues a message"""
print(self)

def meth2(self, arg):

"""and this one not"""
# pylint: disable=unused-argument
print(self\
+ "foo")

def meth3(self):
"""test one line disabling"""
# no error
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(continued from previous page)

print(self.bla) # pylint: disable=no-member
# error
print(self.blop)

def meth4(self):
"""test re-enabling"""
# pylint: disable=no-member
# no error
print(self.bla)
print(self.blop)
# pylint: enable=no-member
# error
print(self.blip)

def meth5(self):
"""test IF sub-block re-enabling"""
# pylint: disable=no-member
# no error
print(self.bla)
if self.blop:
# pylint: enable=no-member
# error
print(self.blip)
else:
# no error
print(self.blip)
# no error
print(self.blip)

def meth6(self):
"""test TRY/EXCEPT sub-block re-enabling"""
# pylint: disable=no-member
# no error
print(self.bla)
try:
# pylint: enable=no-member
# error
print(self.blip)
except UndefinedName: # pylint: disable=undefined-variable
# no error
print(self.blip)
# no error
print(self.blip)

def meth7(self):
"""test one line block opening disabling"""
if self.blop: # pylint: disable=no-member
# error
print(self.blip)
else:
# error
print(self.blip)
# error
print(self.blip)

def meth8(self):
"""test late disabling"""
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(continued from previous page)

# error
print(self.blip)
# pylint: disable=no-member
# no error
print(self.bla)
print(self.blop)

3.5 Configuration

3.5.1 Naming Styles

Introduction

Pylint recognizes a number of different name types internally. With a few exceptions, the type of the name is governed
by the location the assignment to a name is found in, and not the type of object assigned.

Name Type Description

module Module and package names, same as the file names.
const Module-level constants, any variable defined at module level that is not bound to a class
object.
class Names in class statements, as well as names bound to class objects at module level.
function Functions, toplevel or nested in functions or methods.
method Methods, functions defined in class bodies. Includes static and class methods.
attr Attributes created on class instances inside methods.
argument Arguments to any function type, including lambdas.
variable Local variables in function scopes.
class-attribute Attributes defined in class bodies.
inlinevar Loop variables in list comprehensions and generator expressions.

Default behavior

By default, Pylint will enforce PEP8-suggested names.

Predefined Naming Styles

Pylint provides set of predefined naming styles. Those predefined naming styles may be used to adjust Pylint config-
uration to coding style used in linted project.
Following predefined naming styles are available:
• snake_case
• camelCase
• PascalCase
• UPPER_CASE
• any - fake style which does not enforce any limitations
Following options are exposed:

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

--module-naming-style=<style>
--const-naming-style=<style>
--class-naming-style=<style>
--function-naming-style=<style>
--method-naming-style=<style>
--attr-naming-style=<style>
--argument-naming-style=<style>
--variable-naming-style=<style>
--class-attribute-naming-style=<style>
--inlinevar-naming-style=<style>

Custom regular expressions

If predefined naming styles are too limited, checker behavior may be further customized. For each name type, a
separate regular expression matching valid names of this type can be defined. If any of custom regular expressions are
defined, it overrides *-naming-style option value.
Regular expressions for the names are anchored at the beginning, any anchor for the end must be supplied explicitly.
Any name not matching the regular expression will lead to an instance of invalid-name.
--module-rgx=<regex>
--const-rgx=<regex>
--class-rgx=<regex>
--function-rgx=<regex>
--method-rgx=<regex>
--attr-rgx=<regex>
--argument-rgx=<regex>
--variable-rgx=<regex>
--class-attribute-rgx=<regex>
--inlinevar-rgx=<regex>
Multiple naming styles for custom regular expressions ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^
Large code bases that have been worked on for multiple years often exhibit an evolution in style as well. In some
cases, modules can be in the same package, but still have different naming style based on the stratum they belong to.
However, intra-module consistency should still be required, to make changes inside a single file easier. For this case,
Pylint supports regular expression with several named capturing group.
Rather than emitting name warnings immediately, Pylint will determine the prevalent naming style inside each module
and enforce it on all names.
Consider the following (simplified) example:

pylint --function-rgx='(?:(?P<snake>[a-z_]+)|(?P<camel>_?[A-Z]+))$' sample.py

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The regular expression defines two naming styles, snake for snake-case names, and camel for camel-case names.
In sample.py, the function name on line 1 and 7 will mark the module and enforce the match of named group
snake for the remaining names in the module:

def valid_snake_case(arg):
...

def InvalidCamelCase(arg):
...

def more_valid_snake_case(arg):
...

Because of this, the name on line 4 will trigger an invalid-name warning, even though the name matches the given
regex.
Matches named exempt or ignore can be used for non-tainting names, to prevent built-in or interface-dictated
names to trigger certain naming styles.
--name-group=<name1:name2:...,...>
Default value: empty
Format: comma-separated groups of colon-separated names.
This option can be used to combine name styles. For example, function:method enforces that functions
and methods use the same style, and a style triggered by either name type carries over to the other. This requires
that the regular expression for the combined name types use the same group names.

Name Hints

--include-naming-hint=y|n
Default: off
Include a hint (regular expression used) for the correct name format with every invalid-name warning.

3.6 Editor and IDE integration

To use Pylint with:

• Emacs, see http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PythonProgrammingInEmacs#toc8,
• Vim, see http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=891,
• Visual Studio, see https://docs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/python/code-pylint,
• Eclipse and PyDev, see http://pydev.org/manual_adv_pylint.html,
• Komodo, see http://mateusz.loskot.net/posts/2006/01/15/running-pylint-from-komodo/,
• gedit, see https://launchpad.net/gedit-pylint-2 or https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Gedit/PylintPlugin,
• WingIDE, see http://www.wingware.com/doc/edit/pylint,
• PyCharm, see the section below,
• TextMate, see the section below
• Visual Studio Code, see https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/linting#_pylint,
Pylint is integrated in:

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• Visual Studio, see the Python > Run PyLint command on a project’s context menu.
• Eric IDE, see the Project > Check menu,
• Spyder, see the View -> Panes -> Static code analysis pane and its corresponding documentation.
• pyscripter, see the Tool -> Tools menu.
• Visual Studio Code, see the Preferences -> Settings menu.

3.6.1 Using Pylint thru flymake in Emacs

To enable flymake for Python, insert the following into your .emacs:

;; Configure flymake for Python

(when (load "flymake" t)
(defun flymake-pylint-init ()
(let* ((temp-file (flymake-init-create-temp-buffer-copy
'flymake-create-temp-inplace))
(local-file (file-relative-name
temp-file
(file-name-directory buffer-file-name))))
(list "epylint" (list local-file))))
(add-to-list 'flymake-allowed-file-name-masks
'("\\.py\\'" flymake-pylint-init)))

;; Set as a minor mode for Python

(add-hook 'python-mode-hook '(lambda () (flymake-mode)))

Above stuff is in pylint/elisp/pylint-flymake.el, which should be automatically installed on Debian

systems, in which cases you don’t have to put it in your .emacs file.
Other things you may find useful to set:

;; Configure to wait a bit longer after edits before starting

(setq-default flymake-no-changes-timeout '3)

;; Keymaps to navigate to the errors

(add-hook 'python-mode-hook '(lambda () (define-key python-mode-map "\C-cn" 'flymake-
˓→goto-next-error)))

(add-hook 'python-mode-hook '(lambda () (define-key python-mode-map "\C-cp" 'flymake-

˓→goto-prev-error)))

Finally, by default flymake only displays the extra information about the error when you hover the mouse over the
highlighted line. The following will use the minibuffer to display messages when you the cursor is on the line.

;; To avoid having to mouse hover for the error message, these functions make flymake
˓→error messages

;; appear in the minibuffer

(defun show-fly-err-at-point ()
"If the cursor is sitting on a flymake error, display the message in the minibuffer"
(require 'cl)
(interactive)
(let ((line-no (line-number-at-pos)))
(dolist (elem flymake-err-info)
(if (eq (car elem) line-no)
(let ((err (car (second elem))))
(message "%s" (flymake-ler-text err)))))))
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(add-hook 'post-command-hook 'show-fly-err-at-point)

Alternative, if you only wish to pollute the minibuffer after an explicit flymake-goto-* then use the following instead
of a post-command-hook

(defadvice flymake-goto-next-error (after display-message activate compile)

"Display the error in the mini-buffer rather than having to mouse over it"
(show-fly-err-at-point))

(defadvice flymake-goto-prev-error (after display-message activate compile)

"Display the error in the mini-buffer rather than having to mouse over it"
(show-fly-err-at-point))

3.6.2 Integrate Pylint with PyCharm

Install Pylint the usual way:

pip install pylint

Remember the path at which it’s installed:

which pylint

Using pylint-pycharm plugin

1. In PyCharm go to Preferences > Plugins > Browse repositories...

2. Right-click on the plugin named Pylint, select Download and Install and restart PyCharm when prompted
If the plugin is not finding the Pylint executable (e.g. is not inside the PATH environmental variable), you can specify
it manually using the plugin settings:
1. Preferences > Other Settings > Pylint or simply click the gear icon from the side bar of the Pylint tool window
2. Type the path directly or use the Browse button to open a file selection dialog
3. Press the Test button to check if the plugin is able to run the executable
For more info on how to use the plugin please check the official plugin documentation.

Using External Tools

Within PyCharm:
1. Navigate to the preferences window
2. Select "External Tools"
3. Click the plus sign at the bottom of the dialog to add a new external task
4. In the dialog, populate the following fields:
Name Pylint
Description A Python source code analyzer which looks for programming errors, helps enforcing a
coding standard and sniffs for some code smells.

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Synchronize files after execution unchecked

Program /path/to/pylint
Parameters $FilePath$
5. Click OK
The option to check the current file with Pylint should now be available in Tools > External Tools > Pylint.

3.6.3 Integrate Pylint with TextMate

Install Pylint in the usual way:

pip install pylint

Install the Python bundle for TextMate:

1. select TextMate > Preferences
2. select the Bundles tab
3. find and tick the Python bundle in the list
You should now see it in Bundles > Python.
In Preferences, select the Variables tab. If a TM_PYCHECKER variable is not already listed, add it, with the value
pylint.
The default keyboard shortcut to run the syntax checker is Control-Shift-V - open a .py file in Textmate, and try it.
You should see the output in a new window:
PyCheckMate 1.2 – Pylint 1.4.4
No config file found, using default configuration
Then all is well, and most likely Pylint will have expressed some opinions about your Python code (or will exit with 0
if your code already conforms to its expectations).
If you receive a message:
Please install PyChecker, PyFlakes, Pylint, PEP 8 or flake8 for more extensive code checking.
That means that Pylint wasn’t found, which is likely an issue with command paths - TextMate needs be looking for
Pylint on the right paths.
Check where Pylint has been installed, using which:

$ which pylint
/usr/local/bin/pylint

The output will tell you where Pylint can be found; in this case, in /usr/local/bin.
1. select TextMate > Preferences
2. select the Variables tab
3. find and check that a PATH variable exists, and that it contains the appropriate path (if the path to Pylint
were /usr/local/bin/pylint as above, then the variable would need to contain /usr/local/bin).
An actual example in this case might be $PATH:/opt/local/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/texbin,
which includes other paths.
... and try running Pylint again.

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3.6.4 Integrate Pylint with Visual Studio Code

Command-line arguments and configuration files

See Pylint command line arguments for general switches. Command line arguments can be used to load Pylint plugins,
such as that for Django:

"python.linting.pylintArgs": ["--load-plugins", "pylint_django"]

Options can also be specified in a pylintrc or .pylintrc file in the workspace folder, as described on Pylint
command line arguments.
To control which Pylint messages are shown, add the following contents to an options file:

[MESSAGES CONTROL]

# Enable the message, report, category or checker with the given id(s). You can
# either give multiple identifier separated by comma (,) or put this option
# multiple time.
#enable=

# Disable the message, report, category or checker with the given id(s). You
# can either give multiple identifier separated by comma (,) or put this option
# multiple time (only on the command line, not in the configuration file where
# it should appear only once).
#disable=

Message category mapping

The Python extension maps Pylint message categories to VS Code categories through the following settings. If desired,
change the setting to change the mapping.

Pylint category Applicable setting (python.linting.) VS Code category mapping

convention pylintCategorySeverity.convention Information
refactor pylintCategorySeverity.refactor Hint
warning pylintCategorySeverity.warning Warning
error pylintCategorySeverity.error Error
fatal pylintCategorySeverity.fatal Error

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CHAPTER 4

How To Guides

4.1 How to Write a Checker

You can find some simple examples in the distribution (custom.py and custom_raw.py).
There are three kinds of checkers:
• Raw checkers, which analyse each module as a raw file stream.
• Token checkers, which analyse a file using the list of tokens that represent the source code in the file.
• AST checkers, which work on an AST representation of the module.
The AST representation is provided by the astroid library. astroid adds additional information and methods
over ast in the standard library, to make tree navigation and code introspection easier.

4.1.1 Writing an AST Checker

Let’s implement a checker to make sure that all return nodes in a function return a unique constant. Firstly we will
need to fill in some required boilerplate:

import astroid

from pylint.checkers import BaseChecker

from pylint.interfaces import IAstroidChecker

class UniqueReturnChecker(BaseChecker):
__implements__ = IAstroidChecker

name = 'unique-returns'
priority = -1
msgs = {
'W0001': (
'Returns a non-unique constant.',
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27
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(continued from previous page)

'non-unique-returns',
'All constants returned in a function should be unique.'
),
}
options = (
(
'ignore-ints',
{
'default': False, 'type': 'yn', 'metavar' : '<y_or_n>',
'help': 'Allow returning non-unique integers',
}
),
)

So far we have defined the following required components of our checker:

• A name. The name is used to generate a special configuration section for the checker, when options have
been provided.
• A priority. This must be to be lower than 0. The checkers are ordered by the priority when run, from the
most negative to the most positive.
• A message dictionary. Each checker is being used for finding problems in your code, the problems being
displayed to the user through messages. The message dictionary should specify what messages the checker
is going to emit. It has the following format:

msgs = {
'message-id': (
'displayed-message', 'message-symbol', 'message-help'
)
}

– The message-id should be a 5-digit number, prefixed with a message category. There are mul-
tiple message categories, these being C, W, E, F, R, standing for Convention, Warning, Error,
Fatal and Refactoring. The rest of the 5 digits should not conflict with existing checkers and
they should be consistent across the checker. For instance, the first two digits should not be different
across the checker.
– The displayed-message is used for displaying the message to the user, once it is emitted.
– The message-symbol is an alias of the message id and it can be used wherever the message id can
be used.
– The message-help is used when calling pylint --help-msg.
We have also defined an optional component of the checker. The options list defines any user configurable options. It
has the following format:

options = (
'option-symbol': {'argparse-like-kwarg': 'value'},
)

• The option-symbol is a unique name for the option. This is used on the command line and in config
files. The hyphen is replaced by an underscore when used in the checker, similarly to how you would use
argparse.Namespace.
Next we’ll track when we enter and leave a function.

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def __init__(self, linter=None):

super(UniqueReturnChecker, self).__init__(linter)
self._function_stack = []

def visit_functiondef(self, node):

self._function_stack.append([])

def leave_functiondef(self, node):

self._function_stack.pop()

In the constructor we initialise a stack to keep a list of return nodes for each function. An AST checker is a visitor,
and should implement visit_<lowered class name> or leave_<lowered class name> methods for
the nodes it’s interested in. In this case we have implemented visit_functiondef and leave_functiondef
to add a new list of return nodes for this function, and to remove the list of return nodes when we leave the function.
Finally we’ll implement the check. We will define a visit_return function, which is called with a astroid.
node_classes.Return node.
We’ll need to be able to figure out what attributes a astroid.node_classes.Return node has available. We
can use astroid.extract_node() for this:

>>> node = astroid.extract_node("return 5")

>>> node
<Return l.1 at 0x7efe62196390>
>>> help(node)
>>> node.value
<Const.int l.1 at 0x7efe62196ef0>

We could also construct a more complete example:

>>> node_a, node_b = astroid.extract_node("""

... def test():
... if True:
... return 5 #@
... return 5 #@
""")
>>> node_a.value
<Const.int l.4 at 0x7efe621a74e0>
>>> node_a.value.value
5
>>> node_a.value.value == node_b.value.value
True

For astroid.extract_node(), you can use #@ at the end of a line to choose which statements will be extracted
into nodes.
For more information on astroid.extract_node(), see the astroid documentation.
Now we know how to use the astroid node, we can implement our check.

def visit_return(self, node):

if not isinstance(node.value, astroid.node_classes.Const):
return

for other_return in self._function_stack[-1]:

if (node.value.value == other_return.value.value and
not (self.config.ignore_ints and node.value.pytype() == int)):
self.add_message(
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(continued from previous page)

'non-unique-returns', node=node,
)

self._function_stack[-1].append(node)

Once we have established that the source code has failed our check, we use add_message() to emit our failure
message.
Finally, we need to register the checker with pylint. Add the register function to the top level of the file.

def register(linter):
linter.register_checker(UniqueReturnChecker(linter))

We are now ready to debug and test our checker!

4.1.2 Debugging a Checker

It is very simple to get to a point where we can use pdb. We’ll need a small test case. Put the following into a Python
file:

def test():
if True:
return 5
return 5

def test2():
if True:
return 1
return 5

After inserting pdb into our checker and installing it, we can run pylint with only our checker:

$ pylint --load-plugins=my_plugin --disable=all --enable=non-unique-returns test.py

(Pdb)

Now we can debug our checker!

Note: my_plugin refers to a module called my_plugin.py. This module can be made available to pylint by
putting this module’s parent directory in your PYTHONPATH environment variable or by adding the my_plugin.py
file to the pylint/checkers directory if running from source.

4.1.3 Testing a Checker

Pylint is very well suited to test driven development. You can implement the template of the checker, produce all of
your test cases and check that they fail, implement the checker, then check that all of your test cases work.
Pylint provides a pylint.testutils.CheckerTestCase to make test cases very simple. We can use the
example code that we used for debugging as our test cases.

import my_plugin
import pylint.testutils

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(continued from previous page)

class TestUniqueReturnChecker(pylint.testutils.CheckerTestCase):
CHECKER_CLASS = my_plugin.UniqueReturnChecker

def test_finds_non_unique_ints(self):
func_node, return_node_a, return_node_b = astroid.extract_node("""
def test(): #@
if True:
return 5 #@
return 5 #@
""")

self.checker.visit_functiondef(func_node)
self.checker.visit_return(return_node_a)
with self.assertAddsMessages(
pylint.testutils.Message(
msg_id='non-unique-returns',
node=return_node_b,
),
):
self.checker.visit_return(return_node_b)

def test_ignores_unique_ints(self):
func_node, return_node_a, return_node_b = astroid.extract_node("""
def test(): #@
if True:
return 1 #@
return 5 #@
""")

with self.assertNoMessages():
self.checker.visit_functiondef(func_node)
self.checker.visit_return(return_node_a)
self.checker.visit_return(return_node_b)

Once again we are using astroid.extract_node() to construct our test cases. pylint.testutils.
CheckerTestCase has created the linter and checker for us, we simply simulate a traversal of the AST tree using
the nodes that we are interested in.

4.2 How To Write a Pylint Plugin

Pylint provides support for writing two types of extensions. First, there is the concept of checkers, which can be used
for finding problems in your code. Secondly, there is also the concept of transform plugin, which represents a way
through which the inference and the capabilities of Pylint can be enhanced and tailored to a particular module, library
of framework.
In general, a plugin is a module which should have a function register, which takes an instance of pylint.
lint.PyLinter as input.
A plugin can optionally define also function load_configuration, which takes an instance of pylint.lint.
PyLinter as input. This function is called after Pylint loads configuration from configuration file and command line
interface. This function should load additional plugin specific configuration to Pylint.
So a basic hello-world plugin can be implemented as:

4.2. How To Write a Pylint Plugin 31

Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

# Inside hello_plugin.py
def register(linter):
print 'Hello world'

We can run this plugin by placing this module in the PYTHONPATH and invoking pylint as:

$ pylint -E --load-plugins hello_plugin foo.py

Hello world

We can extend hello-world plugin to ignore some specific names using load_configuration function:

# Inside hello_plugin.py
def register(linter):
print 'Hello world'

def load_configuration(linter):

name_checker = get_checker(linter, NameChecker)

# We consider as good names of variables Hello and World
name_checker.config.good_names += ('Hello', 'World')

# We ignore bin directory

linter.config.black_list += ('bin',)

Depending if we need a transform plugin or a checker, this might not be enough. For the former, this is enough to
declare the module as a plugin, but in the case of the latter, we need to register our checker with the linter object, by
calling the following inside the register function:

linter.register_checker(OurChecker(linter))

For more information on writing a checker see How to Write a Checker.

4.3 Transform plugins

4.3.1 Why write a plugin?

Pylint is a static analysis tool and Python is a dynamically typed language. So there will be cases where Pylint cannot
analyze files properly (this problem can happen in statically typed languages also if reflection or dynamic evaluation
is used).
The plugins are a way to tell Pylint how to handle such cases, since only the user would know what needs to be done.
They are usually operating on the AST level, by modifying or changing it in a way which can ease its understanding
by Pylint.

4.3.2 Example

Let us run Pylint on a module from the Python source: warnings.py and see what happens:

amitdev$ pylint -E Lib/warnings.py

E:297,36: Instance of 'WarningMessage' has no 'message' member (no-member)
E:298,36: Instance of 'WarningMessage' has no 'filename' member (no-member)
E:298,51: Instance of 'WarningMessage' has no 'lineno' member (no-member)
E:298,64: Instance of 'WarningMessage' has no 'line' member (no-member)

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

Did we catch a genuine error? Let’s open the code and look at WarningMessage class:

class WarningMessage(object):

"""Holds the result of a single showwarning() call."""

_WARNING_DETAILS = ("message", "category", "filename", "lineno", "file",

"line")

def __init__(self, message, category, filename, lineno, file=None,

line=None):
local_values = locals()
for attr in self._WARNING_DETAILS:
setattr(self, attr, local_values[attr])
self._category_name = category.__name__ if category else None

def __str__(self):
...

Ah, the fields (message, category etc) are not defined statically on the class. Instead they are added using
setattr. Pylint would have a tough time figuring this out.

4.3.3 Enter Plugin

We can write a transform plugin to tell Pylint how to analyze this properly.
One way to fix our example with a plugin would be to transform the WarningMessage class, by setting the attributes
so that Pylint can see them. This can be done by registering a transform function. We can transform any node in the
parsed AST like Module, Class, Function etc. In our case we need to transform a class. It can be done so:

import astroid
from astroid import MANAGER

def register(linter):
# Needed for registering the plugin.
pass

def transform(cls):
if cls.name == 'WarningMessage':
import warnings
for f in warnings.WarningMessage._WARNING_DETAILS:
cls.locals[f] = [astroid.ClassDef(f, None)]

MANAGER.register_transform(astroid.ClassDef, transform)

Let’s go through the plugin. First, we need to register a class transform, which is done via the
register_transform function in MANAGER. It takes the node type and function as parameters. We need to
change a class, so we use astroid.ClassDef. We also pass a transform function which does the actual
transformation.
transform function is simple as well. If the class is WarningMessage then we add the attributes to its locals (we
are not bothered about type of attributes, so setting them as class will do. But we could set them to any type we want).
That’s it.
Note: We don’t need to do anything in the register function of the plugin since we are not modifying anything in
the linter itself.
Lets run Pylint with this plugin and see:

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

amitdev$ pylint -E --load-plugins warning_plugin Lib/warnings.py

amitdev$

All the false positives associated with WarningMessage are now gone. This is just an example, any code transfor-
mation can be done by plugins.
See astroid/brain for real life examples of transform plugins.

34 Chapter 4. How To Guides

CHAPTER 5

Technical Reference

5.1 Startup and the Linter Class

The two main classes in pylint.lint are pylint.lint.Run and pylint.lint.PyLinter.

The pylint.lint.Run object is responsible for starting up pylint. It does some basic checking of the given
command line options to find the initial hook to run, find the config file to use, and find which plugins have been
specified. It can then create the master pylint.lint.PyLinter instance and initialise it with the config file and
plugins that were discovered when preprocessing the command line options. Finally the pylint.lint.Run object
launches any child linters for parallel jobs, and starts the linting process.
The pylint.lint.PyLinter is responsible for coordinating the linting process. It parses the configuration and
provides it for the checkers and other plugins, it handles the messages emitted by the checkers, it handles the output
reporting, and it launches the checkers.

5.2 Checkers

All of the default pylint checkers exist in pylint.checkers. This is where most of pylint’s brains exist. Most
checkers are AST based and so use astroid. pylint.checkers.utils provides a large number of utility
methods for dealing with astroid.

5.3 Optional Pylint checkers in the extensions module

Pylint provides the following optional plugins:

• Deprecated Builtins checker
• Broad Try Clause checker
• Else If Used checker
• Compare-To-Zero checker

35
Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• Parameter Documentation checker

• Docstyle checker
• Compare-To-Empty-String checker
• Design checker
• Overlap-Except checker
• Multiple Types checker
You can activate any or all of these extensions by adding a load-plugins line to the MASTER section of your
.pylintrc, for example:

load-plugins=pylint.extensions.docparams,pylint.extensions.docstyle

5.3.1 Broad Try Clause checker

This checker is provided by pylint.extensions.broad_try_clause. Verbatim name of the checker is

broad_try_clause.

Broad Try Clause checker Options

max-try-statements Maximum number of statements allowed in a try clause

Default: 1

Broad Try Clause checker Messages

too-many-try-statements (W0717) Try clause contains too many statements.

5.3.2 Compare-To-Empty-String checker

This checker is provided by pylint.extensions.emptystring. Verbatim name of the checker is

compare-to-empty-string.

Compare-To-Empty-String checker Messages

compare-to-empty-string (C1901) Avoid comparisons to empty string Used when Pylint detects com-
parison to an empty string constant.

5.3.3 Compare-To-Zero checker

This checker is provided by pylint.extensions.comparetozero. Verbatim name of the checker is

compare-to-zero.

Compare-To-Zero checker Messages

compare-to-zero (C2001) Avoid comparisons to zero Used when Pylint detects comparison to a 0 con-
stant.

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

5.3.4 Deprecated Builtins checker

This checker is provided by pylint.extensions.bad_builtin. Verbatim name of the checker is

deprecated_builtins.

Deprecated Builtins checker Documentation

This used to be the bad-builtin core checker, but it was moved to an extension instead. It can be used for finding
prohibited used builtins, such as map or filter, for which other alternatives exists.
If you want to control for what builtins the checker should warn about, you can use the bad-functions option:

$ pylint a.py --load-plugins=pylint.extensions.bad_builtin --bad-functions=apply,

˓→reduce

...

Deprecated Builtins checker Options

bad-functions List of builtins function names that should not be used, separated by a comma
Default: map,filter

Deprecated Builtins checker Messages

bad-builtin (W0141) Used builtin function %s Used when a black listed builtin function is used (see the
bad-function option). Usual black listed functions are the ones like map, or filter , where Python
offers now some cleaner alternative like list comprehension.

5.3.5 Design checker

This checker is provided by pylint.extensions.mccabe. Verbatim name of the checker is design.

Design checker Documentation

You can now use this plugin for finding complexity issues in your code base.
Activate it through pylint --load-plugins=pylint.extensions.mccabe. It introduces a new warning,
too-complex, which is emitted when a code block has a complexity higher than a preestablished value, which can
be controlled through the max-complexity option, such as in this example:

$ cat a.py
def f10():
"""McCabe rating: 11"""
myint = 2
if myint == 5:
return myint
elif myint == 6:
return myint
elif myint == 7:
return myint
elif myint == 8:
return myint
(continues on next page)

5.3. Optional Pylint checkers in the extensions module 37

Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

(continued from previous page)

elif myint == 9:
return myint
elif myint == 10:
if myint == 8:
while True:
return True
elif myint == 8:
with myint:
return 8
else:
if myint == 2:
return myint
return myint
return myint
$ pylint a.py --load-plugins=pylint.extensions.mccabe
R:1: 'f10' is too complex. The McCabe rating is 11 (too-complex)
$ pylint a.py --load-plugins=pylint.extensions.mccabe --max-complexity=50
$

Design checker Options

max-complexity McCabe complexity cyclomatic threshold

Default: 10

Design checker Messages

too-complex (R1260) %s is too complex. The McCabe rating is %d Used when a method or function is
too complex based on McCabe Complexity Cyclomatic

5.3.6 Docstyle checker

This checker is provided by pylint.extensions.docstyle. Verbatim name of the checker is docstyle.

Docstyle checker Messages

bad-docstring-quotes (C0198) Bad docstring quotes in %s, expected """, given %s Used when a doc-
string does not have triple double quotes.
docstring-first-line-empty (C0199) First line empty in %s docstring Used when a blank line is found at
the beginning of a docstring.

5.3.7 Else If Used checker

This checker is provided by pylint.extensions.check_elif. Verbatim name of the checker is

else_if_used.

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Else If Used checker Messages

else-if-used (R5501) Consider using "elif" instead of "else if" Used when an else statement is immedi-
ately followed by an if statement and does not contain statements that would be unrelated to it.

5.3.8 Multiple Types checker

This checker is provided by pylint.extensions.redefined_variable_type. Verbatim name of the

checker is multiple_types.

Multiple Types checker Messages

redefined-variable-type (R0204) Redefinition of %s type from %s to %s Used when the type of a variable
changes inside a method or a function.

5.3.9 Overlap-Except checker

This checker is provided by pylint.extensions.overlapping_exceptions. Verbatim name of the

checker is overlap-except.

Overlap-Except checker Messages

overlapping-except (W0714) Overlapping exceptions (%s) Used when exceptions in handler overlap or
are identical

5.3.10 Parameter Documentation checker

This checker is provided by pylint.extensions.docparams. Verbatim name of the checker is

parameter_documentation.

Parameter Documentation checker Documentation

If you document the parameters of your functions, methods and constructors and their types systematically in your
code this optional component might be useful for you. Sphinx style, Google style, and Numpy style are supported.
(For some examples, see https://pypi.python.org/pypi/sphinxcontrib-napoleon .)
You can activate this checker by adding the line:

load-plugins=pylint.extensions.docparams

to the MASTER section of your .pylintrc.

This checker verifies that all function, method, and constructor docstrings include documentation of the
• parameters and their types
• return value and its type
• exceptions raised
and can handle docstrings in
• Sphinx style (param, type, return, rtype, raise / except):

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

def function_foo(x, y, z):

'''function foo ...

:param x: bla x
:type x: int

:param y: bla y
:type y: float

:param int z: bla z

:return: sum
:rtype: float

:raises OSError: bla

'''
return x + y + z

• or the Google style (Args:, Returns:, Raises:):

def function_foo(x, y, z):

'''function foo ...

Args:
x (int): bla x
y (float): bla y

z (int): bla z

Returns:
float: sum

Raises:
OSError: bla
'''
return x + y + z

• or the Numpy style (Parameters, Returns, Raises):

def function_foo(x, y, z):

'''function foo ...

Parameters
----------
x: int
bla x
y: float
bla y

z: int
bla z

Returns
-------
float
sum

(continues on next page)

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

(continued from previous page)

Raises
------
OSError
bla
'''
return x + y + z

You’ll be notified of missing parameter documentation but also of naming inconsistencies between the signature
and the documentation which often arise when parameters are renamed automatically in the code, but not in the
documentation.
Constructor parameters can be documented in either the class docstring or the __init__ docstring, but not both:
class ClassFoo(object):
'''Sphinx style docstring foo

:param float x: bla x

:param y: bla y
:type y: int
'''
def __init__(self, x, y):
pass

class ClassBar(object):
def __init__(self, x, y):
'''Google style docstring bar

Args:
x (float): bla x
y (int): bla y
'''
pass

In some cases, having to document all parameters is a nuisance, for instance if many of your functions or methods just
follow a common interface. To remove this burden, the checker accepts missing parameter documentation if one of
the following phrases is found in the docstring:
• For the other parameters, see
• For the parameters, see
(with arbitrary whitespace between the words). Please add a link to the docstring defining the interface, e.g. a
superclass method, after "see":
def callback(x, y, z):
'''Sphinx style docstring for callback ...

:param x: bla x
:type x: int

For the other parameters, see

:class:`MyFrameworkUsingAndDefiningCallback`
'''
return x + y + z

def callback(x, y, z):

'''Google style docstring for callback ...
(continues on next page)

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

(continued from previous page)

Args:
x (int): bla x

For the other parameters, see

:class:`MyFrameworkUsingAndDefiningCallback`
'''
return x + y + z

Naming inconsistencies in existing parameter and their type documentations are still detected.

Parameter Documentation checker Options

accept-no-param-doc Whether to accept totally missing parameter documentation in the docstring of a

function that has parameters.
Default: yes
accept-no-raise-doc Whether to accept totally missing raises documentation in the docstring of a func-
tion that raises an exception.
Default: yes
accept-no-return-doc Whether to accept totally missing return documentation in the docstring of a func-
tion that returns a statement.
Default: yes
accept-no-yields-doc Whether to accept totally missing yields documentation in the docstring of a gen-
erator.
Default: yes
default-docstring-type If the docstring type cannot be guessed the specified docstring type will be used.
Default: default

Parameter Documentation checker Messages

differing-param-doc (W9017) "%s" differing in parameter documentation Please check parameter

names in declarations.
differing-type-doc (W9018) "%s" differing in parameter type documentation Please check parameter
names in type declarations.
multiple-constructor-doc (W9005) "%s" has constructor parameters documented in class and __init__
Please remove parameter declarations in the class or constructor.
missing-param-doc (W9015) "%s" missing in parameter documentation Please add parameter declara-
tions for all parameters.
missing-type-doc (W9016) "%s" missing in parameter type documentation Please add parameter type
declarations for all parameters.
missing-raises-doc (W9006) "%s" not documented as being raised Please document exceptions for all
raised exception types.
missing-return-doc (W9011) Missing return documentation Please add documentation about what this
method returns.

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missing-return-type-doc (W9012) Missing return type documentation Please document the type re-
turned by this method.
missing-yield-doc (W9013) Missing yield documentation Please add documentation about what this gen-
erator yields.
missing-yield-type-doc (W9014) Missing yield type documentation Please document the type yielded
by this method.
redundant-returns-doc (W9008) Redundant returns documentation Please remove the return/rtype doc-
umentation from this method.
redundant-yields-doc (W9010) Redundant yields documentation Please remove the yields documenta-
tion from this method.

5.4 Pylint features

5.4.1 Pylint global options and switches

Pylint provides global options and switches.

General options

ignore Add files or directories to the blacklist. They should be base names, not paths.
Default: CVS
ignore-patterns Add files or directories matching the regex patterns to the blacklist. The regex matches
against base names, not paths.
persistent Pickle collected data for later comparisons.
Default: yes
load-plugins List of plugins (as comma separated values of python module names) to load, usually to
register additional checkers.
jobs Use multiple processes to speed up Pylint. Specifying 0 will auto-detect the number of processors
available to use.
Default: 1
unsafe-load-any-extension Allow loading of arbitrary C extensions. Extensions are imported into the
active Python interpreter and may run arbitrary code.
limit-inference-results Control the amount of potential inferred values when inferring a single object.
This can help the performance when dealing with large functions or complex, nested conditions.
Default: 100
extension-pkg-whitelist A comma-separated list of package or module names from where C extensions
may be loaded. Extensions are loading into the active Python interpreter and may run arbitrary code.
suggestion-mode When enabled, pylint would attempt to guess common misconfiguration and emit user-
friendly hints instead of false-positive error messages.
Default: yes
exit-zero Always return a 0 (non-error) status code, even if lint errors are found. This is primarily useful
in continuous integration scripts.

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

from-stdin Interpret the stdin as a python script, whose filename needs to be passed as the mod-
ule_or_package argument.

Messages control options

confidence Only show warnings with the listed confidence levels. Leave empty to show all. Valid levels:
HIGH, INFERENCE, INFERENCE_FAILURE, UNDEFINED.
enable Enable the message, report, category or checker with the given id(s). You can either give multiple
identifier separated by comma (,) or put this option multiple time (only on the command line, not in
the configuration file where it should appear only once). See also the "–disable" option for examples.
disable Disable the message, report, category or checker with the given id(s). You can either give multiple
identifiers separated by comma (,) or put this option multiple times (only on the command line, not
in the configuration file where it should appear only once). You can also use "–disable=all" to
disable everything first and then reenable specific checks. For example, if you want to run only the
similarities checker, you can use "–disable=all –enable=similarities". If you want to run only the
classes checker, but have no Warning level messages displayed, use "–disable=all –enable=classes
–disable=W".
Default: print-statement,parameter-unpacking,unpacking-in-except,
old-raise-syntax,backtick,long-suffix,old-ne-operator,
old-octal-literal,import-star-module-level,non-ascii-bytes-literal,
apply-builtin,basestring-builtin,buffer-builtin,cmp-builtin,
coerce-builtin,execfile-builtin,file-builtin,long-builtin,
raw_input-builtin,reduce-builtin,standarderror-builtin,
unicode-builtin,xrange-builtin,coerce-method,delslice-method,
getslice-method,setslice-method,no-absolute-import,
old-division,dict-iter-method,dict-view-method,
next-method-called,metaclass-assignment,indexing-exception,
raising-string,reload-builtin,oct-method,hex-method,
nonzero-method,cmp-method,input-builtin,round-builtin,
intern-builtin,unichr-builtin,map-builtin-not-iterating,
zip-builtin-not-iterating,range-builtin-not-iterating,
filter-builtin-not-iterating,using-cmp-argument,eq-without-hash,
div-method,idiv-method,rdiv-method,exception-message-attribute,
invalid-str-codec,sys-max-int,bad-python3-import,
deprecated-string-function,deprecated-str-translate-call,
deprecated-itertools-function,deprecated-types-field,
next-method-defined,dict-items-not-iterating,
dict-keys-not-iterating,dict-values-not-iterating,
deprecated-operator-function,deprecated-urllib-function,
xreadlines-attribute,deprecated-sys-function,exception-escape,
comprehension-escape

Reports options

output-format Set the output format. Available formats are text, parseable, colorized, json and msvs
(visual studio). You can also give a reporter class, e.g. mypackage.mymodule.MyReporterClass.
Default: text
reports Tells whether to display a full report or only the messages.
evaluation Python expression which should return a score less than or equal to 10. You have access to
the variables ’error’, ’warning’, ’refactor’, and ’convention’ which contain the number of messages

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in each category, as well as ’statement’ which is the total number of statements analyzed. This score
is used by the global evaluation report (RP0004).
Default: 10.0 - ((float(5 * error + warning + refactor + convention)
/ statement) * 10)
score Activate the evaluation score.
Default: yes
msg-template Template used to display messages. This is a python new-style format string used to
format the message information. See doc for all details.

5.4.2 Pylint checkers’ options and switches

Pylint checkers can provide three set of features:

• options that control their execution,
• messages that they can raise,
• reports that they can generate.
Below is a list of all checkers and their features.

Async checker

Verbatim name of the checker is async.

Async checker Messages

not-async-context-manager (E1701) Async context manager ’%s’ doesn’t implement __aenter__ and
__aexit__. Used when an async context manager is used with an object that does not implement the
async context management protocol. This message can’t be emitted when using Python < 3.5.
yield-inside-async-function (E1700) Yield inside async function Used when an yield or yield from state-
ment is found inside an async function. This message can’t be emitted when using Python < 3.5.

Basic checker

Verbatim name of the checker is basic.

Basic checker Options

good-names Good variable names which should always be accepted, separated by a comma.
Default: i,j,k,ex,Run,_
bad-names Bad variable names which should always be refused, separated by a comma.
Default: foo,bar,baz,toto,tutu,tata
name-group Colon-delimited sets of names that determine each other’s naming style when the name
regexes allow several styles.
include-naming-hint Include a hint for the correct naming format with invalid-name.

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

property-classes List of decorators that produce properties, such as abc.abstractproperty. Add to this list
to register other decorators that produce valid properties. These decorators are taken in consideration
only for invalid-name.
Default: abc.abstractproperty
argument-naming-style Naming style matching correct argument names.
Default: snake_case
argument-rgx Regular expression matching correct argument names. Overrides argument- naming-
style.
attr-naming-style Naming style matching correct attribute names.
Default: snake_case
attr-rgx Regular expression matching correct attribute names. Overrides attr-naming- style.
class-naming-style Naming style matching correct class names.
Default: PascalCase
class-rgx Regular expression matching correct class names. Overrides class-naming- style.
class-attribute-naming-style Naming style matching correct class attribute names.
Default: any
class-attribute-rgx Regular expression matching correct class attribute names. Overrides class-
attribute-naming-style.
const-naming-style Naming style matching correct constant names.
Default: UPPER_CASE
const-rgx Regular expression matching correct constant names. Overrides const-naming- style.
function-naming-style Naming style matching correct function names.
Default: snake_case
function-rgx Regular expression matching correct function names. Overrides function- naming-style.
inlinevar-naming-style Naming style matching correct inline iteration names.
Default: any
inlinevar-rgx Regular expression matching correct inline iteration names. Overrides inlinevar-naming-
style.
method-naming-style Naming style matching correct method names.
Default: snake_case
method-rgx Regular expression matching correct method names. Overrides method-naming- style.
module-naming-style Naming style matching correct module names.
Default: snake_case
module-rgx Regular expression matching correct module names. Overrides module-naming- style.
variable-naming-style Naming style matching correct variable names.
Default: snake_case
variable-rgx Regular expression matching correct variable names. Overrides variable- naming-style.

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no-docstring-rgx Regular expression which should only match function or class names that do not re-
quire a docstring.
Default: ^_
docstring-min-length Minimum line length for functions/classes that require docstrings, shorter ones
are exempt.
Default: -1

Basic checker Messages

not-in-loop (E0103) %r not properly in loop Used when break or continue keywords are used outside a
loop.
function-redefined (E0102) %s already defined line %s Used when a function / class / method is rede-
fined.
continue-in-finally (E0116) ’continue’ not supported inside ’finally’ clause Emitted when the continue
keyword is found inside a finally clause, which is a SyntaxError.
abstract-class-instantiated (E0110) Abstract class %r with abstract methods instantiated Used when
an abstract class with abc.ABCMeta as metaclass has abstract methods and is instantiated.
star-needs-assignment-target (E0114) Can use starred expression only in assignment target Emitted
when a star expression is not used in an assignment target.
duplicate-argument-name (E0108) Duplicate argument name %s in function definition Duplicate argu-
ment names in function definitions are syntax errors.
return-in-init (E0101) Explicit return in __init__ Used when the special class method __init__ has an
explicit return value.
too-many-star-expressions (E0112) More than one starred expression in assignment Emitted when
there are more than one starred expressions (*x) in an assignment. This is a SyntaxError.
nonlocal-and-global (E0115) Name %r is nonlocal and global Emitted when a name is both nonlocal
and global.
used-prior-global-declaration (E0118) Name %r is used prior to global declaration Emitted when a
name is used prior a global declaration, which results in an error since Python 3.6. This message
can’t be emitted when using Python < 3.6.
return-outside-function (E0104) Return outside function Used when a "return" statement is found out-
side a function or method.
return-arg-in-generator (E0106) Return with argument inside generator Used when a "return" state-
ment with an argument is found outside in a generator function or method (e.g. with some "yield"
statements). This message can’t be emitted when using Python >= 3.3.
invalid-star-assignment-target (E0113) Starred assignment target must be in a list or tuple Emitted
when a star expression is used as a starred assignment target.
bad-reversed-sequence (E0111) The first reversed() argument is not a sequence Used when the first
argument to reversed() builtin isn’t a sequence (does not implement __reversed__, nor __getitem__
and __len__
nonexistent-operator (E0107) Use of the non-existent %s operator Used when you attempt to use the
C-style pre-increment or pre-decrement operator – and ++, which doesn’t exist in Python.
yield-outside-function (E0105) Yield outside function Used when a "yield" statement is found outside a
function or method.

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init-is-generator (E0100) __init__ method is a generator Used when the special class method __init__
is turned into a generator by a yield in its body.
misplaced-format-function (E0119) format function is not called on str Emitted when format function
is not called on str object. e.g doing print("value: {}").format(123) instead of print("value: {}".for-
mat(123)). This might not be what the user intended to do.
nonlocal-without-binding (E0117) nonlocal name %s found without binding Emitted when a nonlocal
variable does not have an attached name somewhere in the parent scopes
lost-exception (W0150) %s statement in finally block may swallow exception Used when a break or a
return statement is found inside the finally clause of a try...finally block: the exceptions raised in the
try clause will be silently swallowed instead of being re-raised.
assert-on-tuple (W0199) Assert called on a 2-item-tuple. Did you mean ’assert x,y’? A call of assert on
a tuple will always evaluate to true if the tuple is not empty, and will always evaluate to false if it is.
self-assigning-variable (W0127) Assigning the same variable %r to itself Emitted when we detect that
a variable is assigned to itself
comparison-with-callable (W0143) Comparing against a callable, did you omit the parenthesis? This
message is emitted when pylint detects that a comparison with a callable was made, which might
suggest that some parenthesis were omitted, resulting in potential unwanted behaviour.
dangerous-default-value (W0102) Dangerous default value %s as argument Used when a mutable value
as list or dictionary is detected in a default value for an argument.
duplicate-key (W0109) Duplicate key %r in dictionary Used when a dictionary expression binds the
same key multiple times.
useless-else-on-loop (W0120) Else clause on loop without a break statement Loops should only have an
else clause if they can exit early with a break statement, otherwise the statements under else should
be on the same scope as the loop itself.
expression-not-assigned (W0106) Expression "%s" is assigned to nothing Used when an expression that
is not a function call is assigned to nothing. Probably something else was intended.
confusing-with-statement (W0124) Following "as" with another context manager looks like a tuple.
Emitted when a with statement component returns multiple values and uses name binding with as
only for a part of those values, as in with ctx() as a, b. This can be misleading, since it’s not clear if
the context manager returns a tuple or if the node without a name binding is another context manager.
unnecessary-lambda (W0108) Lambda may not be necessary Used when the body of a lambda expres-
sion is a function call on the same argument list as the lambda itself; such lambda expressions are in
all but a few cases replaceable with the function being called in the body of the lambda.
assign-to-new-keyword (W0111) Name %s will become a keyword in Python %s Used when assignment
will become invalid in future Python release due to introducing new keyword.
redeclared-assigned-name (W0128) Redeclared variable %r in assignment Emitted when we detect
that a variable was redeclared in the same assignment.
pointless-statement (W0104) Statement seems to have no effect Used when a statement doesn’t have (or
at least seems to) any effect.
pointless-string-statement (W0105) String statement has no effect Used when a string is used as a state-
ment (which of course has no effect). This is a particular case of W0104 with its own message so
you can easily disable it if you’re using those strings as documentation, instead of comments.
unnecessary-pass (W0107) Unnecessary pass statement Used when a "pass" statement that can be
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unreachable (W0101) Unreachable code Used when there is some code behind a "return" or "raise"
statement, which will never be accessed.
eval-used (W0123) Use of eval Used when you use the "eval" function, to discourage its usage. Consider
using ast.literal_eval for safely evaluating strings containing Python expressions from untrusted
sources.
exec-used (W0122) Use of exec Used when you use the "exec" statement (function for Python 3), to
discourage its usage. That doesn’t mean you cannot use it !
using-constant-test (W0125) Using a conditional statement with a constant value Emitted when a con-
ditional statement (If or ternary if) uses a constant value for its test. This might not be what the user
intended to do.
missing-parentheses-for-call-in-test (W0126) Using a conditional statement with potentially wrong
function or method call due to missing parentheses Emitted when a conditional statement (If or
ternary if) seems to wrongly call a function due to missing parentheses
literal-comparison (R0123) Comparison to literal Used when comparing an object to a literal, which
is usually what you do not want to do, since you can compare to a different literal than what was
expected altogether.
comparison-with-itself (R0124) Redundant comparison - %s Used when something is compared against
itself.
invalid-name (C0103) %s name "%s" doesn’t conform to %s Used when the name doesn’t conform to
naming rules associated to its type (constant, variable, class...).
blacklisted-name (C0102) Black listed name "%s" Used when the name is listed in the black list (unau-
thorized names).
misplaced-comparison-constant (C0122) Comparison should be %s Used when the constant is placed
on the left side of a comparison. It is usually clearer in intent to place it in the right hand side of the
comparison.
singleton-comparison (C0121) Comparison to %s should be %s Used when an expression is compared
to singleton values like True, False or None.
empty-docstring (C0112) Empty %s docstring Used when a module, function, class or method has an
empty docstring (it would be too easy ;).
missing-class-docstring (C0115) Missing class docstring Used when a class has no docstring.Even an
empty class must have a docstring.
missing-function-docstring (C0116) Missing function or method docstring Used when a function or
method has no docstring.Some special methods like __init__ do not require a docstring.
missing-module-docstring (C0114) Missing module docstring Used when a module has no doc-
string.Empty modules do not require a docstring.
unidiomatic-typecheck (C0123) Using type() instead of isinstance() for a typecheck. The idiomatic way
to perform an explicit typecheck in Python is to use isinstance(x, Y) rather than type(x) == Y, type(x)
is Y. Though there are unusual situations where these give different results.

Basic checker Reports

RP0101 Statistics by type

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Classes checker

Verbatim name of the checker is classes.

Classes checker Options

defining-attr-methods List of method names used to declare (i.e. assign) instance attributes.
Default: __init__,__new__,setUp,__post_init__
valid-classmethod-first-arg List of valid names for the first argument in a class method.
Default: cls
valid-metaclass-classmethod-first-arg List of valid names for the first argument in a metaclass class
method.
Default: cls
exclude-protected List of member names, which should be excluded from the protected access warning.
Default: _asdict,_fields,_replace,_source,_make

Classes checker Messages

access-member-before-definition (E0203) Access to member %r before its definition line %s Used when
an instance member is accessed before it’s actually assigned.
method-hidden (E0202) An attribute defined in %s line %s hides this method Used when a class defines
a method which is hidden by an instance attribute from an ancestor class or set by some client code.
assigning-non-slot (E0237) Assigning to attribute %r not defined in class slots Used when assigning to
an attribute not defined in the class slots.
duplicate-bases (E0241) Duplicate bases for class %r Used when a class has duplicate bases.
inconsistent-mro (E0240) Inconsistent method resolution order for class %r Used when a class has an
inconsistent method resolution order.
inherit-non-class (E0239) Inheriting %r, which is not a class. Used when a class inherits from some-
thing which is not a class.
invalid-slots (E0238) Invalid __slots__ object Used when an invalid __slots__ is found in class. Only a
string, an iterable or a sequence is permitted.
invalid-slots-object (E0236) Invalid object %r in __slots__, must contain only non empty strings Used
when an invalid (non-string) object occurs in __slots__.
no-method-argument (E0211) Method has no argument Used when a method which should have the
bound instance as first argument has no argument defined.
no-self-argument (E0213) Method should have "self" as first argument Used when a method has an
attribute different the "self" as first argument. This is considered as an error since this is a so common
convention that you shouldn’t break it!
unexpected-special-method-signature (E0302) The special method %r expects %s param(s), %d %s
given Emitted when a special method was defined with an invalid number of parameters. If it has
too few or too many, it might not work at all.
class-variable-slots-conflict (E0242) Value %r in slots conflicts with class variable Used when a value
in __slots__ conflicts with a class variable, property or method.

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non-iterator-returned (E0301) __iter__ returns non-iterator Used when an __iter__ method returns
something which is not an iterable (i.e. has no __next__ method)
invalid-length-returned (E0303) __len__ does not return non-negative integer Used when a __len__
method returns something which is not a non-negative integer
protected-access (W0212) Access to a protected member %s of a client class Used when a protected
member (i.e. class member with a name beginning with an underscore) is access outside the class or
a descendant of the class where it’s defined.
attribute-defined-outside-init (W0201) Attribute %r defined outside __init__ Used when an instance
attribute is defined outside the __init__ method.
no-init (W0232) Class has no __init__ method Used when a class has no __init__ method, neither its
parent classes.
abstract-method (W0223) Method %r is abstract in class %r but is not overridden Used when an ab-
stract method (i.e. raise NotImplementedError) is not overridden in concrete class.
invalid-overridden-method (W0236) Method %r was expected to be %r, found it instead as %r Used
when we detect that a method was overridden as a property or the other way around, which could
result in potential bugs at runtime.
arguments-differ (W0221) Parameters differ from %s %r method Used when a method has a different
number of arguments than in the implemented interface or in an overridden method.
signature-differs (W0222) Signature differs from %s %r method Used when a method signature is dif-
ferent than in the implemented interface or in an overridden method.
bad-staticmethod-argument (W0211) Static method with %r as first argument Used when a static
method has "self" or a value specified in valid- classmethod-first-arg option or valid-metaclass-
classmethod-first-arg option as first argument.
useless-super-delegation (W0235) Useless super delegation in method %r Used whenever we can detect
that an overridden method is useless, relying on super() delegation to do the same thing as another
method from the MRO.
non-parent-init-called (W0233) __init__ method from a non direct base class %r is called Used when
an __init__ method is called on a class which is not in the direct ancestors for the analysed class.
super-init-not-called (W0231) __init__ method from base class %r is not called Used when an ancestor
class method has an __init__ method which is not called by a derived class.
property-with-parameters (R0206) Cannot have defined parameters for properties Used when we de-
tect that a property also has parameters, which are useless, given that properties cannot be called
with additional arguments.
useless-object-inheritance (R0205) Class %r inherits from object, can be safely removed from bases in
python3 Used when a class inherit from object, which under python3 is implicit, hence can be safely
removed from bases.
no-classmethod-decorator (R0202) Consider using a decorator instead of calling classmethod Used
when a class method is defined without using the decorator syntax.
no-staticmethod-decorator (R0203) Consider using a decorator instead of calling staticmethod Used
when a static method is defined without using the decorator syntax.
no-self-use (R0201) Method could be a function Used when a method doesn’t use its bound instance,
and so could be written as a function.
single-string-used-for-slots (C0205) Class __slots__ should be a non-string iterable Used when a class
__slots__ is a simple string, rather than an iterable.

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bad-classmethod-argument (C0202) Class method %s should have %s as first argument Used when a
class method has a first argument named differently than the value specified in valid-classmethod-
first-arg option (default to "cls"), recommended to easily differentiate them from regular instance
methods.
bad-mcs-classmethod-argument (C0204) Metaclass class method %s should have %s as first argument
Used when a metaclass class method has a first argument named differently than the value specified
in valid-metaclass-classmethod-first-arg option (default to "mcs"), recommended to easily differen-
tiate them from regular instance methods.
bad-mcs-method-argument (C0203) Metaclass method %s should have %s as first argument Used
when a metaclass method has a first argument named differently than the value specified in valid-
classmethod-first-arg option (default to "cls"), recommended to easily differentiate them from regu-
lar instance methods.
method-check-failed (F0202) Unable to check methods signature (%s / %s) Used when Pylint has been
unable to check methods signature compatibility for an unexpected reason. Please report this kind
if you don’t make sense of it.

Design checker

Verbatim name of the checker is design.

Design checker Options

max-args Maximum number of arguments for function / method.

Default: 5
max-locals Maximum number of locals for function / method body.
Default: 15
max-returns Maximum number of return / yield for function / method body.
Default: 6
max-branches Maximum number of branch for function / method body.
Default: 12
max-statements Maximum number of statements in function / method body.
Default: 50
max-parents Maximum number of parents for a class (see R0901).
Default: 7
max-attributes Maximum number of attributes for a class (see R0902).
Default: 7
min-public-methods Minimum number of public methods for a class (see R0903).
Default: 2
max-public-methods Maximum number of public methods for a class (see R0904).
Default: 20

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max-bool-expr Maximum number of boolean expressions in an if statement (see R0916).

Default: 5

Design checker Messages

too-few-public-methods (R0903) Too few public methods (%s/%s) Used when class has too few public
methods, so be sure it’s really worth it.
too-many-ancestors (R0901) Too many ancestors (%s/%s) Used when class has too many parent classes,
try to reduce this to get a simpler (and so easier to use) class.
too-many-arguments (R0913) Too many arguments (%s/%s) Used when a function or method takes too
many arguments.
too-many-boolean-expressions (R0916) Too many boolean expressions in if statement (%s/%s) Used
when an if statement contains too many boolean expressions.
too-many-branches (R0912) Too many branches (%s/%s) Used when a function or method has too
many branches, making it hard to follow.
too-many-instance-attributes (R0902) Too many instance attributes (%s/%s) Used when class has too
many instance attributes, try to reduce this to get a simpler (and so easier to use) class.
too-many-locals (R0914) Too many local variables (%s/%s) Used when a function or method has too
many local variables.
too-many-public-methods (R0904) Too many public methods (%s/%s) Used when class has too many
public methods, try to reduce this to get a simpler (and so easier to use) class.
too-many-return-statements (R0911) Too many return statements (%s/%s) Used when a function or
method has too many return statement, making it hard to follow.
too-many-statements (R0915) Too many statements (%s/%s) Used when a function or method has too
many statements. You should then split it in smaller functions / methods.

Exceptions checker

Verbatim name of the checker is exceptions.

Exceptions checker Options

overgeneral-exceptions Exceptions that will emit a warning when being caught. Defaults to "BaseEx-
ception, Exception".
Default: BaseException,Exception

Exceptions checker Messages

bad-except-order (E0701) Bad except clauses order (%s) Used when except clauses are not in the cor-
rect order (from the more specific to the more generic). If you don’t fix the order, some exceptions
may not be caught by the most specific handler.
catching-non-exception (E0712) Catching an exception which doesn’t inherit from Exception: %s Used
when a class which doesn’t inherit from Exception is used as an exception in an except clause.

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bad-exception-context (E0703) Exception context set to something which is not an exception, nor None
Used when using the syntax "raise ... from ...", where the exception context is not an exception, nor
None.
notimplemented-raised (E0711) NotImplemented raised - should raise NotImplementedError Used
when NotImplemented is raised instead of NotImplementedError
raising-bad-type (E0702) Raising %s while only classes or instances are allowed Used when something
which is neither a class, an instance or a string is raised (i.e. a TypeError will be raised).
raising-non-exception (E0710) Raising a new style class which doesn’t inherit from BaseException
Used when a new style class which doesn’t inherit from BaseException is raised.
misplaced-bare-raise (E0704) The raise statement is not inside an except clause Used when a bare raise
is not used inside an except clause. This generates an error, since there are no active exceptions to
be reraised. An exception to this rule is represented by a bare raise inside a finally clause, which
might work, as long as an exception is raised inside the try block, but it is nevertheless a code smell
that must not be relied upon.
duplicate-except (W0705) Catching previously caught exception type %s Used when an except catches
a type that was already caught by a previous handler.
broad-except (W0703) Catching too general exception %s Used when an except catches a too general
exception, possibly burying unrelated errors.
raising-format-tuple (W0715) Exception arguments suggest string formatting might be intended Used
when passing multiple arguments to an exception constructor, the first of them a string literal con-
taining what appears to be placeholders intended for formatting
binary-op-exception (W0711) Exception to catch is the result of a binary "%s" operation Used when
the exception to catch is of the form "except A or B:". If intending to catch multiple, rewrite as
"except (A, B):"
wrong-exception-operation (W0716) Invalid exception operation. %s Used when an operation is done
against an exception, but the operation is not valid for the exception in question. Usually emitted
when having binary operations between exceptions in except handlers.
bare-except (W0702) No exception type(s) specified Used when an except clause doesn’t specify excep-
tions type to catch.
try-except-raise (W0706) The except handler raises immediately Used when an except handler uses
raise as its first or only operator. This is useless because it raises back the exception immediately.
Remove the raise operator or the entire try-except-raise block!

Format checker

Verbatim name of the checker is format.

Format checker Options

max-line-length Maximum number of characters on a single line.

Default: 100
ignore-long-lines Regexp for a line that is allowed to be longer than the limit.
Default: ^\s*(# )?<?https?://\S+>?$
single-line-if-stmt Allow the body of an if to be on the same line as the test if there is no else.

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single-line-class-stmt Allow the body of a class to be on the same line as the declaration if body contains
single statement.
no-space-check List of optional constructs for which whitespace checking is disabled. dict- separator
is used to allow tabulation in dicts, etc.: {1 : 1,n222: 2}. trailing-comma allows a space between
comma and closing bracket: (a, ). empty-line allows space-only lines.
Default: trailing-comma,dict-separator
max-module-lines Maximum number of lines in a module.
Default: 1000
indent-string String used as indentation unit. This is usually " " (4 spaces) or "t" (1 tab).
Default: ' '
indent-after-paren Number of spaces of indent required inside a hanging or continued line.
Default: 4
expected-line-ending-format Expected format of line ending, e.g. empty (any line ending), LF or CRLF.

Format checker Messages

bad-indentation (W0311) Bad indentation. Found %s %s, expected %s Used when an unexpected num-
ber of indentation’s tabulations or spaces has been found.
mixed-indentation (W0312) Found indentation with %ss instead of %ss Used when there are some
mixed tabs and spaces in a module.
unnecessary-semicolon (W0301) Unnecessary semicolon Used when a statement is ended by a semi-
colon (";"), which isn’t necessary (that’s python, not C ;).
bad-whitespace (C0326) %s space %s %s %s Used when a wrong number of spaces is used around an
operator, bracket or block opener.
missing-final-newline (C0304) Final newline missing Used when the last line in a file is missing a new-
line.
line-too-long (C0301) Line too long (%s/%s) Used when a line is longer than a given number of charac-
ters.
mixed-line-endings (C0327) Mixed line endings LF and CRLF Used when there are mixed (LF and
CRLF) newline signs in a file.
multiple-statements (C0321) More than one statement on a single line Used when more than on state-
ment are found on the same line.
too-many-lines (C0302) Too many lines in module (%s/%s) Used when a module has too many lines,
reducing its readability.
trailing-newlines (C0305) Trailing newlines Used when there are trailing blank lines in a file.
trailing-whitespace (C0303) Trailing whitespace Used when there is whitespace between the end of a
line and the newline.
unexpected-line-ending-format (C0328) Unexpected line ending format. There is ’%s’ while it should
be ’%s’. Used when there is different newline than expected.
superfluous-parens (C0325) Unnecessary parens after %r keyword Used when a single item in paren-
theses follows an if, for, or other keyword.
bad-continuation (C0330) Wrong %s indentation%s%s. TODO

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Imports checker

Verbatim name of the checker is imports.

Imports checker Options

deprecated-modules Deprecated modules which should not be used, separated by a comma.

Default: optparse,tkinter.tix
preferred-modules Couples of modules and preferred modules, separated by a comma.
import-graph Create a graph of every (i.e. internal and external) dependencies in the given file (report
RP0402 must not be disabled).
ext-import-graph Create a graph of external dependencies in the given file (report RP0402 must not be
disabled).
int-import-graph Create a graph of internal dependencies in the given file (report RP0402 must not be
disabled).
known-standard-library Force import order to recognize a module as part of the standard compatibility
libraries.
known-third-party Force import order to recognize a module as part of a third party library.
Default: enchant
allow-any-import-level List of modules that can be imported at any level, not just the top level one.
analyse-fallback-blocks Analyse import fallback blocks. This can be used to support both Python 2 and
3 compatible code, which means that the block might have code that exists only in one or another
interpreter, leading to false positives when analysed.
allow-wildcard-with-all Allow wildcard imports from modules that define __all__.

Imports checker Messages

relative-beyond-top-level (E0402) Attempted relative import beyond top-level package Used when a rel-
ative import tries to access too many levels in the current package.
import-error (E0401) Unable to import %s Used when pylint has been unable to import a module.
import-self (W0406) Module import itself Used when a module is importing itself.
preferred-module (W0407) Prefer importing %r instead of %r Used when a module imported has a
preferred replacement module.
reimported (W0404) Reimport %r (imported line %s) Used when a module is reimported multiple times.
deprecated-module (W0402) Uses of a deprecated module %r Used a module marked as deprecated is
imported.
wildcard-import (W0401) Wildcard import %s Used when from module import * is detected.
misplaced-future (W0410) __future__ import is not the first non docstring statement Python 2.5 and
greater require __future__ import to be the first non docstring statement in the module.
cyclic-import (R0401) Cyclic import (%s) Used when a cyclic import between two or more modules is
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wrong-import-order (C0411) %s should be placed before %s Used when PEP8 import order is not
respected (standard imports first, then third-party libraries, then local imports)
wrong-import-position (C0413) Import "%s" should be placed at the top of the module Used when code
and imports are mixed
useless-import-alias (C0414) Import alias does not rename original package Used when an import alias
is same as original package.e.g using import numpy as numpy instead of import numpy as np
import-outside-toplevel (C0415) Import outside toplevel (%s) Used when an import statement is used
anywhere other than the module toplevel. Move this import to the top of the file.
ungrouped-imports (C0412) Imports from package %s are not grouped Used when imports are not
grouped by packages
multiple-imports (C0410) Multiple imports on one line (%s) Used when import statement importing
multiple modules is detected.

Imports checker Reports

RP0401 External dependencies

RP0402 Modules dependencies graph

Logging checker

Verbatim name of the checker is logging.

Logging checker Options

logging-modules Logging modules to check that the string format arguments are in logging function
parameter format.
Default: logging
logging-format-style Format style used to check logging format string. old means using % formatting,
new is for {} formatting,and fstr is for f-strings.
Default: old

Logging checker Messages

logging-format-truncated (E1201) Logging format string ends in middle of conversion specifier Used
when a logging statement format string terminates before the end of a conversion specifier.
logging-too-few-args (E1206) Not enough arguments for logging format string Used when a logging
format string is given too few arguments.
logging-too-many-args (E1205) Too many arguments for logging format string Used when a logging
format string is given too many arguments.
logging-unsupported-format (E1200) Unsupported logging format character %r (%#02x) at index %d
Used when an unsupported format character is used in a logging statement format string.

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logging-not-lazy (W1201) Specify string format arguments as logging function parameters Used when a
logging statement has a call form of "logging.<logging method>(format_string % (format_args...))".
Such calls should leave string interpolation to the logging method itself and be written "log-
ging.<logging method>(format_string, format_args...)" so that the program may avoid incurring
the cost of the interpolation in those cases in which no message will be logged. For more, see
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0282/.
logging-format-interpolation (W1202) Use %s formatting in logging functions%s Used when a logging
statement has a call form of "logging.<logging method>(<string formatting>)". with invalid string
formatting. Use another way for format the string instead.

Metrics checker

Verbatim name of the checker is metrics.

Metrics checker Reports

RP0701 Raw metrics

Miscellaneous checker

Verbatim name of the checker is miscellaneous.

Miscellaneous checker Options

notes List of note tags to take in consideration, separated by a comma.

Default: FIXME,XXX,TODO

Miscellaneous checker Messages

fixme (W0511) Used when a warning note as FIXME or XXX is detected.

use-symbolic-message-instead (I0023) Used when a message is enabled or disabled by id.

Newstyle checker

Verbatim name of the checker is newstyle.

Newstyle checker Messages

bad-super-call (E1003) Bad first argument %r given to super() Used when another argument than the
current class is given as first argument of the super builtin.

Python3 checker

Verbatim name of the checker is python3.

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Python3 checker Messages

unpacking-in-except (E1603) Implicit unpacking of exceptions is not supported in Python 3 Python3

will not allow implicit unpacking of exceptions in except clauses. See http://www.python.org/dev/
peps/pep-3110/
import-star-module-level (E1609) Import * only allowed at module level Used when the import star
syntax is used somewhere else than the module level. This message can’t be emitted when using
Python >= 3.0.
non-ascii-bytes-literal (E1610) Non-ascii bytes literals not supported in 3.x Used when non-ascii bytes
literals are found in a program. They are no longer supported in Python 3. This message can’t be
emitted when using Python >= 3.0.
parameter-unpacking (E1602) Parameter unpacking specified Used when parameter unpacking is spec-
ified for a function(Python 3 doesn’t allow it)
long-suffix (E1606) Use of long suffix Used when "l" or "L" is used to mark a long integer. This will not
work in Python 3, since int and long types have merged. This message can’t be emitted when using
Python >= 3.0.
old-octal-literal (E1608) Use of old octal literal Used when encountering the old octal syntax, removed
in Python 3. To use the new syntax, prepend 0o on the number. This message can’t be emitted when
using Python >= 3.0.
old-ne-operator (E1607) Use of the <> operator Used when the deprecated "<>" operator is used in-
stead of "!=". This is removed in Python 3. This message can’t be emitted when using Python >=
3.0.
backtick (E1605) Use of the ‘‘ operator Used when the deprecated "‘‘" (backtick) operator is used in-
stead of the str() function.
old-raise-syntax (E1604) Use raise ErrorClass(args) instead of raise ErrorClass, args. Used when the
alternate raise syntax ’raise foo, bar’ is used instead of ’raise foo(bar)’.
print-statement (E1601) print statement used Used when a print statement is used (print is a function in
Python 3)
deprecated-types-field (W1652) Accessing a deprecated fields on the types module Used when access-
ing a field on types that has been removed in Python 3.
deprecated-itertools-function (W1651) Accessing a deprecated function on the itertools module Used
when accessing a function on itertools that has been removed in Python 3.
deprecated-string-function (W1649) Accessing a deprecated function on the string module Used when
accessing a string function that has been deprecated in Python 3.
deprecated-operator-function (W1657) Accessing a removed attribute on the operator module Used
when accessing a field on operator module that has been removed in Python 3.
deprecated-sys-function (W1660) Accessing a removed attribute on the sys module Used when access-
ing a field on sys module that has been removed in Python 3.
deprecated-urllib-function (W1658) Accessing a removed attribute on the urllib module Used when
accessing a field on urllib module that has been removed or moved in Python 3.
xreadlines-attribute (W1659) Accessing a removed xreadlines attribute Used when accessing the xread-
lines() function on a file stream, removed in Python 3.
metaclass-assignment (W1623) Assigning to a class’s __metaclass__ attribute Used when a metaclass
is specified by assigning to __metaclass__ (Python 3 specifies the metaclass as a class statement
argument)

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next-method-called (W1622) Called a next() method on an object Used when an object’s next() method
is called (Python 3 uses the next() built- in function)
dict-iter-method (W1620) Calling a dict.iter*() method Used for calls to dict.iterkeys(), itervalues() or
iteritems() (Python 3 lacks these methods)
dict-view-method (W1621) Calling a dict.view*() method Used for calls to dict.viewkeys(), viewval-
ues() or viewitems() (Python 3 lacks these methods)
exception-message-attribute (W1645) Exception.message removed in Python 3 Used when the message
attribute is accessed on an Exception. Use str(exception) instead.
eq-without-hash (W1641) Implementing __eq__ without also implementing __hash__ Used when a
class implements __eq__ but not __hash__. In Python 2, objects get object.__hash__ as the de-
fault implementation, in Python 3 objects get None as their default __hash__ implementation if they
also implement __eq__.
indexing-exception (W1624) Indexing exceptions will not work on Python 3 Indexing exceptions will
not work on Python 3. Use exception.args[index] instead.
bad-python3-import (W1648) Module moved in Python 3 Used when importing a module that no longer
exists in Python 3.
raising-string (W1625) Raising a string exception Used when a string exception is raised. This will not
work on Python 3.
standarderror-builtin (W1611) StandardError built-in referenced Used when the StandardError built-
in function is referenced (missing from Python 3)
comprehension-escape (W1662) Using a variable that was bound inside a comprehension Emitted
when using a variable, that was bound in a comprehension handler, outside of the comprehension
itself. On Python 3 these variables will be deleted outside of the comprehension.
exception-escape (W1661) Using an exception object that was bound by an except handler Emitted
when using an exception, that was bound in an except handler, outside of the except handler. On
Python 3 these exceptions will be deleted once they get out of the except handler.
deprecated-str-translate-call (W1650) Using str.translate with deprecated deletechars parameters
Used when using the deprecated deletechars parameters from str.translate. Use re.sub to remove
the desired characters
using-cmp-argument (W1640) Using the cmp argument for list.sort / sorted Using the cmp argument
for list.sort or the sorted builtin should be avoided, since it was removed in Python 3. Using either
key or functools.cmp_to_key should be preferred.
cmp-method (W1630) __cmp__ method defined Used when a __cmp__ method is defined (method is
not used by Python 3)
coerce-method (W1614) __coerce__ method defined Used when a __coerce__ method is defined
(method is not used by Python 3)
delslice-method (W1615) __delslice__ method defined Used when a __delslice__ method is defined
(method is not used by Python 3)
div-method (W1642) __div__ method defined Used when a __div__ method is defined. Using __true-
div__ and setting__div__ = __truediv__ should be preferred.(method is not used by Python 3)
getslice-method (W1616) __getslice__ method defined Used when a __getslice__ method is defined
(method is not used by Python 3)
hex-method (W1628) __hex__ method defined Used when a __hex__ method is defined (method is not
used by Python 3)

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idiv-method (W1643) __idiv__ method defined Used when an __idiv__ method is defined. Using
__itruediv__ and setting__idiv__ = __itruediv__ should be preferred.(method is not used by Python
3)
nonzero-method (W1629) __nonzero__ method defined Used when a __nonzero__ method is defined
(method is not used by Python 3)
oct-method (W1627) __oct__ method defined Used when an __oct__ method is defined (method is not
used by Python 3)
rdiv-method (W1644) __rdiv__ method defined Used when a __rdiv__ method is defined. Using
__rtruediv__ and setting__rdiv__ = __rtruediv__ should be preferred.(method is not used by Python
3)
setslice-method (W1617) __setslice__ method defined Used when a __setslice__ method is defined
(method is not used by Python 3)
apply-builtin (W1601) apply built-in referenced Used when the apply built-in function is referenced
(missing from Python 3)
basestring-builtin (W1602) basestring built-in referenced Used when the basestring built-in function is
referenced (missing from Python 3)
buffer-builtin (W1603) buffer built-in referenced Used when the buffer built-in function is referenced
(missing from Python 3)
cmp-builtin (W1604) cmp built-in referenced Used when the cmp built-in function is referenced (miss-
ing from Python 3)
coerce-builtin (W1605) coerce built-in referenced Used when the coerce built-in function is referenced
(missing from Python 3)
dict-items-not-iterating (W1654) dict.items referenced when not iterating Used when dict.items is ref-
erenced in a non-iterating context (returns an iterator in Python 3)
dict-keys-not-iterating (W1655) dict.keys referenced when not iterating Used when dict.keys is refer-
enced in a non-iterating context (returns an iterator in Python 3)
dict-values-not-iterating (W1656) dict.values referenced when not iterating Used when dict.values is
referenced in a non-iterating context (returns an iterator in Python 3)
old-division (W1619) division w/o __future__ statement Used for non-floor division w/o a float literal
or from __future__ import division (Python 3 returns a float for int division uncondi-
tionally)
execfile-builtin (W1606) execfile built-in referenced Used when the execfile built-in function is refer-
enced (missing from Python 3)
file-builtin (W1607) file built-in referenced Used when the file built-in function is referenced (missing
from Python 3)
filter-builtin-not-iterating (W1639) filter built-in referenced when not iterating Used when the filter
built-in is referenced in a non-iterating context (returns an iterator in Python 3)
no-absolute-import (W1618) import missing ‘from __future__ import absolute_import‘ Used when an
import is not accompanied by from __future__ import absolute_import (default be-
haviour in Python 3)
input-builtin (W1632) input built-in referenced Used when the input built-in is referenced (backwards-
incompatible semantics in Python 3)
intern-builtin (W1634) intern built-in referenced Used when the intern built-in is referenced (Moved to
sys.intern in Python 3)

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long-builtin (W1608) long built-in referenced Used when the long built-in function is referenced (miss-
ing from Python 3)
map-builtin-not-iterating (W1636) map built-in referenced when not iterating Used when the map
built-in is referenced in a non-iterating context (returns an iterator in Python 3)
next-method-defined (W1653) next method defined Used when a next method is defined that would be
an iterator in Python 2 but is treated as a normal function in Python 3.
invalid-str-codec (W1646) non-text encoding used in str.decode Used when using str.encode or
str.decode with a non-text encoding. Use codecs module to handle arbitrary codecs.
range-builtin-not-iterating (W1638) range built-in referenced when not iterating Used when the range
built-in is referenced in a non-iterating context (returns a range in Python 3)
raw_input-builtin (W1609) raw_input built-in referenced Used when the raw_input built-in function is
referenced (missing from Python 3)
reduce-builtin (W1610) reduce built-in referenced Used when the reduce built-in function is referenced
(missing from Python 3)
reload-builtin (W1626) reload built-in referenced Used when the reload built-in function is referenced
(missing from Python 3). You can use instead imp.reload or importlib.reload.
round-builtin (W1633) round built-in referenced Used when the round built-in is referenced
(backwards-incompatible semantics in Python 3)
sys-max-int (W1647) sys.maxint removed in Python 3 Used when accessing sys.maxint. Use
sys.maxsize instead.
unichr-builtin (W1635) unichr built-in referenced Used when the unichr built-in is referenced (Use chr
in Python 3)
unicode-builtin (W1612) unicode built-in referenced Used when the unicode built-in function is refer-
enced (missing from Python 3)
xrange-builtin (W1613) xrange built-in referenced Used when the xrange built-in function is referenced
(missing from Python 3)
zip-builtin-not-iterating (W1637) zip built-in referenced when not iterating Used when the zip built-in
is referenced in a non-iterating context (returns an iterator in Python 3)

Refactoring checker

Verbatim name of the checker is refactoring.

Refactoring checker Options

max-nested-blocks Maximum number of nested blocks for function / method body

Default: 5
never-returning-functions Complete name of functions that never returns. When checking for
inconsistent-return-statements if a never returning function is called then it will be considered as
an explicit return statement and no message will be printed.
Default: sys.exit

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Refactoring checker Messages

simplify-boolean-expression (R1709) Boolean expression may be simplified to %s Emitted when redun-

dant pre-python 2.5 ternary syntax is used.
consider-using-in (R1714) Consider merging these comparisons with "in" to %r To check if a variable
is equal to one of many values,combine the values into a tuple and check if the variable is contained
"in" it instead of checking for equality against each of the values.This is faster and less verbose.
consider-merging-isinstance (R1701) Consider merging these isinstance calls to isinstance(%s, (%s))
Used when multiple consecutive isinstance calls can be merged into one.
consider-using-dict-comprehension (R1717) Consider using a dictionary comprehension Emitted
when we detect the creation of a dictionary using the dict() callable and a transient list. Although
there is nothing syntactically wrong with this code, it is hard to read and can be simplified to a dict
comprehension.Also it is faster since you don’t need to create another transient list
consider-using-set-comprehension (R1718) Consider using a set comprehension Although there is
nothing syntactically wrong with this code, it is hard to read and can be simplified to a set com-
prehension.Also it is faster since you don’t need to create another transient list
consider-using-get (R1715) Consider using dict.get for getting values from a dict if a key is present or a
default if not Using the builtin dict.get for getting a value from a dictionary if a key is present or a
default if not, is simpler and considered more idiomatic, although sometimes a bit slower
consider-using-join (R1713) Consider using str.join(sequence) for concatenating strings from an iter-
able Using str.join(sequence) is faster, uses less memory and increases readability compared to
for-loop iteration.
consider-using-sys-exit (R1722) Consider using sys.exit() Instead of using exit() or quit(), consider us-
ing the sys.exit().
consider-using-ternary (R1706) Consider using ternary (%s) Used when one of known pre-python 2.5
ternary syntax is used.
consider-swap-variables (R1712) Consider using tuple unpacking for swapping variables You do not
have to use a temporary variable in order to swap variables. Using "tuple unpacking" to directly
swap variables makes the intention more clear.
trailing-comma-tuple (R1707) Disallow trailing comma tuple In Python, a tuple is actually created by
the comma symbol, not by the parentheses. Unfortunately, one can actually create a tuple by mis-
placing a trailing comma, which can lead to potential weird bugs in your code. You should always
use parentheses explicitly for creating a tuple.
stop-iteration-return (R1708) Do not raise StopIteration in generator, use return statement instead Ac-
cording to PEP479, the raise of StopIteration to end the loop of a generator may lead to hard to find
bugs. This PEP specify that raise StopIteration has to be replaced by a simple return statement
inconsistent-return-statements (R1710) Either all return statements in a function should return an ex-
pression, or none of them should. According to PEP8, if any return statement returns an expression,
any return statements where no value is returned should explicitly state this as return None, and an
explicit return statement should be present at the end of the function (if reachable)
redefined-argument-from-local (R1704) Redefining argument with the local name %r Used when a
local name is redefining an argument, which might suggest a potential error. This is taken in account
only for a handful of name binding operations, such as for iteration, with statement assignment and
exception handler assignment.
chained-comparison (R1716) Simplify chained comparison between the operands This message is emit-
ted when pylint encounters boolean operation like"a < b and b < c", suggesting instead to refactor it
to "a < b < c"

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simplifiable-if-expression (R1719) The if expression can be replaced with %s Used when an if expres-
sion can be replaced with ’bool(test)’.
simplifiable-if-statement (R1703) The if statement can be replaced with %s Used when an if statement
can be replaced with ’bool(test)’.
too-many-nested-blocks (R1702) Too many nested blocks (%s/%s) Used when a function or a method
has too many nested blocks. This makes the code less understandable and maintainable.
no-else-break (R1723) Unnecessary "%s" after "break" Used in order to highlight an unnecessary block
of code following an if containing a break statement. As such, it will warn when it encounters an
else following a chain of ifs, all of them containing a break statement.
no-else-continue (R1724) Unnecessary "%s" after "continue" Used in order to highlight an unneces-
sary block of code following an if containing a continue statement. As such, it will warn when it
encounters an else following a chain of ifs, all of them containing a continue statement.
no-else-raise (R1720) Unnecessary "%s" after "raise" Used in order to highlight an unnecessary block
of code following an if containing a raise statement. As such, it will warn when it encounters an else
following a chain of ifs, all of them containing a raise statement.
no-else-return (R1705) Unnecessary "%s" after "return" Used in order to highlight an unnecessary
block of code following an if containing a return statement. As such, it will warn when it encounters
an else following a chain of ifs, all of them containing a return statement.
unnecessary-comprehension (R1721) Unnecessary use of a comprehension Instead of using an identitiy
comprehension, consider using the list, dict or set constructor. It is faster and simpler.
useless-return (R1711) Useless return at end of function or method Emitted when a single "return" or
"return None" statement is found at the end of function or method definition. This statement can
safely be removed because Python will implicitly return None
unneeded-not (C0113) Consider changing "%s" to "%s" Used when a boolean expression contains an
unneeded negation.
consider-iterating-dictionary (C0201) Consider iterating the dictionary directly instead of calling
.keys() Emitted when the keys of a dictionary are iterated through the .keys() method. It is enough
to just iterate through the dictionary itself, as in "for key in dictionary".
consider-using-enumerate (C0200) Consider using enumerate instead of iterating with range and len
Emitted when code that iterates with range and len is encountered. Such code can be simplified by
using the enumerate builtin.
len-as-condition (C1801) Do not use ‘len(SEQUENCE)‘ without comparison to determine if a sequence
is empty Used when Pylint detects that len(sequence) is being used without explicit comparison
inside a condition to determine if a sequence is empty. Instead of coercing the length to a boolean,
either rely on the fact that empty sequences are false or compare the length against a scalar.

Similarities checker

Verbatim name of the checker is similarities.

Similarities checker Options

min-similarity-lines Minimum lines number of a similarity.

Default: 4

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ignore-comments Ignore comments when computing similarities.

Default: yes
ignore-docstrings Ignore docstrings when computing similarities.
Default: yes
ignore-imports Ignore imports when computing similarities.

Similarities checker Messages

duplicate-code (R0801) Similar lines in %s files Indicates that a set of similar lines has been detected
among multiple file. This usually means that the code should be refactored to avoid this duplication.

Similarities checker Reports

RP0801 Duplication

Spelling checker

Verbatim name of the checker is spelling.

Spelling checker Options

spelling-dict Spelling dictionary name. Available dictionaries: none. To make it work, install the python-
enchant package.
spelling-ignore-words List of comma separated words that should not be checked.
spelling-private-dict-file A path to a file that contains the private dictionary; one word per line.
spelling-store-unknown-words Tells whether to store unknown words to the private dictionary (see the
–spelling-private-dict-file option) instead of raising a message.
max-spelling-suggestions Limits count of emitted suggestions for spelling mistakes.
Default: 4

Spelling checker Messages

invalid-characters-in-docstring (C0403) Invalid characters %r in a docstring Used when a word in

docstring cannot be checked by enchant.
wrong-spelling-in-comment (C0401) Wrong spelling of a word ’%s’ in a comment: Used when a word
in comment is not spelled correctly.
wrong-spelling-in-docstring (C0402) Wrong spelling of a word ’%s’ in a docstring: Used when a word
in docstring is not spelled correctly.

Stdlib checker

Verbatim name of the checker is stdlib.

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Stdlib checker Messages

invalid-envvar-value (E1507) %s does not support %s type argument Env manipulation functions sup-
port only string type arguments. See https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.html#os.getenv.
bad-open-mode (W1501) "%s" is not a valid mode for open. Python supports: r, w, a[, x] modes with b,
+, and U (only with r) options. See http://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#open
invalid-envvar-default (W1508) %s default type is %s. Expected str or None. Env manipulation func-
tions return None or str values. Supplying anything different as a default may cause bugs. See
https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.html#os.getenv.
redundant-unittest-assert (W1503) Redundant use of %s with constant value %r The first argument of
assertTrue and assertFalse is a condition. If a constant is passed as parameter, that condition will be
always true. In this case a warning should be emitted.
shallow-copy-environ (W1507) Using copy.copy(os.environ). Use os.environ.copy() instead. os.environ
is not a dict object but proxy object, so shallow copy has still effects on original object. See https:
//bugs.python.org/issue15373 for reference.
boolean-datetime (W1502) Using datetime.time in a boolean context. Using datetime.time in a boolean
context can hide subtle bugs when the time they represent matches midnight UTC. This behaviour
was fixed in Python 3.5. See http://bugs.python.org/issue13936 for reference. This message can’t
be emitted when using Python >= 3.5.
deprecated-method (W1505) Using deprecated method %s() The method is marked as deprecated and
will be removed in a future version of Python. Consider looking for an alternative in the documen-
tation.
subprocess-popen-preexec-fn (W1509) Using preexec_fn keyword which may be unsafe in the presence
of threads The preexec_fn parameter is not safe to use in the presence of threads in your application.
The child process could deadlock before exec is called. If you must use it, keep it trivial! Mini-
mize the number of libraries you call into.https://docs.python.org/3/library/subprocess.html#popen-
constructor
subprocess-run-check (W1510) Using subprocess.run without explicitly set ‘check‘
is not recommended. The check parameter should always be used with ex-
plicitly set check keyword to make clear what the error-handling behavior
is.https://docs.python.org/3/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.runs
bad-thread-instantiation (W1506) threading.Thread needs the target function The warning is emitted
when a threading.Thread class is instantiated without the target function being passed. By default,
the first parameter is the group param, not the target param.

String checker

Verbatim name of the checker is string.

String checker Options

check-str-concat-over-line-jumps This flag controls whether the implicit-str-concat-in-sequence should

generate a warning on implicit string concatenation in sequences defined over several lines.

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String checker Messages

bad-string-format-type (E1307) Argument %r does not match format type %r Used when a type re-
quired by format string is not suitable for actual argument type
format-needs-mapping (E1303) Expected mapping for format string, not %s Used when a format string
that uses named conversion specifiers is used with an argument that is not a mapping.
truncated-format-string (E1301) Format string ends in middle of conversion specifier Used when a
format string terminates before the end of a conversion specifier.
missing-format-string-key (E1304) Missing key %r in format string dictionary Used when a format
string that uses named conversion specifiers is used with a dictionary that doesn’t contain all the
keys required by the format string.
mixed-format-string (E1302) Mixing named and unnamed conversion specifiers in format string Used
when a format string contains both named (e.g. ’%(foo)d’) and unnamed (e.g. ’%d’) conversion
specifiers. This is also used when a named conversion specifier contains * for the minimum field
width and/or precision.
too-few-format-args (E1306) Not enough arguments for format string Used when a format string that
uses unnamed conversion specifiers is given too few arguments
bad-str-strip-call (E1310) Suspicious argument in %s.%s call The argument to a str.{l,r,}strip call con-
tains a duplicate character,
too-many-format-args (E1305) Too many arguments for format string Used when a format string that
uses unnamed conversion specifiers is given too many arguments.
bad-format-character (E1300) Unsupported format character %r (%#02x) at index %d Used when an
unsupported format character is used in a format string.
anomalous-unicode-escape-in-string (W1402) Anomalous Unicode escape in byte string: ’%s’. String
constant might be missing an r or u prefix. Used when an escape like u is encountered in a byte
string where it has no effect.
anomalous-backslash-in-string (W1401) Anomalous backslash in string: ’%s’. String constant might
be missing an r prefix. Used when a backslash is in a literal string but not as an escape.
duplicate-string-formatting-argument (W1308) Duplicate string formatting argument %r, consider
passing as named argument Used when we detect that a string formatting is repeating an argument
instead of using named string arguments
format-combined-specification (W1305) Format string contains both automatic field numbering and
manual field specification Used when a PEP 3101 format string contains both automatic field num-
bering (e.g. ’{}’) and manual field specification (e.g. ’{0}’).
bad-format-string-key (W1300) Format string dictionary key should be a string, not %s Used when a
format string that uses named conversion specifiers is used with a dictionary whose keys are not all
strings.
implicit-str-concat-in-sequence (W1403) Implicit string concatenation found in %s String literals are
implicitly concatenated in a literal iterable definition : maybe a comma is missing ?
bad-format-string (W1302) Invalid format string Used when a PEP 3101 format string is invalid.
missing-format-attribute (W1306) Missing format attribute %r in format specifier %r Used when a
PEP 3101 format string uses an attribute specifier ({0.length}), but the argument passed for format-
ting doesn’t have that attribute.
missing-format-argument-key (W1303) Missing keyword argument %r for format string Used when a
PEP 3101 format string that uses named fields doesn’t receive one or more required keywords.

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unused-format-string-argument (W1304) Unused format argument %r Used when a PEP 3101 format
string that uses named fields is used with an argument that is not required by the format string.
unused-format-string-key (W1301) Unused key %r in format string dictionary Used when a format
string that uses named conversion specifiers is used with a dictionary that contains keys not required
by the format string.
invalid-format-index (W1307) Using invalid lookup key %r in format specifier %r Used when a PEP
3101 format string uses a lookup specifier ({a[1]}), but the argument passed for formatting doesn’t
contain or doesn’t have that key as an attribute.

Typecheck checker

Verbatim name of the checker is typecheck.

Typecheck checker Options

ignore-on-opaque-inference This flag controls whether pylint should warn about no-member and similar
checks whenever an opaque object is returned when inferring. The inference can return multiple
potential results while evaluating a Python object, but some branches might not be evaluated, which
results in partial inference. In that case, it might be useful to still emit no-member and other checks
for the rest of the inferred objects.
Default: yes
ignore-mixin-members Tells whether missing members accessed in mixin class should be ignored. A
mixin class is detected if its name ends with "mixin" (case insensitive).
Default: yes
ignore-none Tells whether to warn about missing members when the owner of the attribute is inferred to
be None.
Default: yes
ignored-modules List of module names for which member attributes should not be checked (useful for
modules/projects where namespaces are manipulated during runtime and thus existing member at-
tributes cannot be deduced by static analysis). It supports qualified module names, as well as Unix
pattern matching.
ignored-classes List of class names for which member attributes should not be checked (useful for classes
with dynamically set attributes). This supports the use of qualified names.
Default: optparse.Values,thread._local,_thread._local
generated-members List of members which are set dynamically and missed by pylint inference system,
and so shouldn’t trigger E1101 when accessed. Python regular expressions are accepted.
contextmanager-decorators List of decorators that produce context managers, such as con-
textlib.contextmanager. Add to this list to register other decorators that produce valid context man-
agers.
Default: contextlib.contextmanager
missing-member-hint-distance The minimum edit distance a name should have in order to be consid-
ered a similar match for a missing member name.
Default: 1

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missing-member-max-choices The total number of similar names that should be taken in consideration
when showing a hint for a missing member.
Default: 1
missing-member-hint Show a hint with possible names when a member name was not found. The aspect
of finding the hint is based on edit distance.
Default: yes
signature-mutators List of decorators that change the signature of a decorated function.

Typecheck checker Messages

unsupported-assignment-operation (E1137) %r does not support item assignment Emitted when an

object does not support item assignment (i.e. doesn’t define __setitem__ method).
unsupported-delete-operation (E1138) %r does not support item deletion Emitted when an object does
not support item deletion (i.e. doesn’t define __delitem__ method).
invalid-unary-operand-type (E1130) Emitted when a unary operand is used on an object which does
not support this type of operation.
unsupported-binary-operation (E1131) Emitted when a binary arithmetic operation between two
operands is not supported.
no-member (E1101) %s %r has no %r member%s Used when a variable is accessed for an unexistent
member.
not-callable (E1102) %s is not callable Used when an object being called has been inferred to a non
callable object.
redundant-keyword-arg (E1124) Argument %r passed by position and keyword in %s call Used when
a function call would result in assigning multiple values to a function parameter, one value from a
positional argument and one from a keyword argument.
assignment-from-no-return (E1111) Assigning result of a function call, where the function has no re-
turn Used when an assignment is done on a function call but the inferred function doesn’t return
anything.
assignment-from-none (E1128) Assigning result of a function call, where the function returns None
Used when an assignment is done on a function call but the inferred function returns nothing but
None.
not-context-manager (E1129) Context manager ’%s’ doesn’t implement __enter__ and __exit__.
Used when an instance in a with statement doesn’t implement the context manager proto-
col(__enter__/__exit__).
unhashable-dict-key (E1140) Dict key is unhashable Emitted when a dict key is not hashable (i.e.
doesn’t define __hash__ method).
repeated-keyword (E1132) Got multiple values for keyword argument %r in function call Emitted when
a function call got multiple values for a keyword.
invalid-metaclass (E1139) Invalid metaclass %r used Emitted whenever we can detect that a class is
using, as a metaclass, something which might be invalid for using as a metaclass.
missing-kwoa (E1125) Missing mandatory keyword argument %r in %s call Used when a function call
does not pass a mandatory keyword-only argument.
no-value-for-parameter (E1120) No value for argument %s in %s call Used when a function call passes
too few arguments.

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not-an-iterable (E1133) Non-iterable value %s is used in an iterating context Used when a non-iterable
value is used in place where iterable is expected
not-a-mapping (E1134) Non-mapping value %s is used in a mapping context Used when a non-mapping
value is used in place where mapping is expected
invalid-sequence-index (E1126) Sequence index is not an int, slice, or instance with __index__ Used
when a sequence type is indexed with an invalid type. Valid types are ints, slices, and objects with
an __index__ method.
invalid-slice-index (E1127) Slice index is not an int, None, or instance with __index__ Used when a
slice index is not an integer, None, or an object with an __index__ method.
too-many-function-args (E1121) Too many positional arguments for %s call Used when a function call
passes too many positional arguments.
unexpected-keyword-arg (E1123) Unexpected keyword argument %r in %s call Used when a function
call passes a keyword argument that doesn’t correspond to one of the function’s parameter names.
dict-iter-missing-items (E1141) Unpacking a dictionary in iteration without calling .items() Emitted
when trying to iterate through a dict without calling .items()
unsupported-membership-test (E1135) Value ’%s’ doesn’t support membership test Emitted when
an instance in membership test expression doesn’t implement membership protocol (__con-
tains__/__iter__/__getitem__).
unsubscriptable-object (E1136) Value ’%s’ is unsubscriptable Emitted when a subscripted value
doesn’t support subscription (i.e. doesn’t define __getitem__ method or __class_getitem__ for a
class).
keyword-arg-before-vararg (W1113) Keyword argument before variable positional arguments list in
the definition of %s function When defining a keyword argument before variable positional argu-
ments, one can end up in having multiple values passed for the aforementioned parameter in case
the method is called with keyword arguments.
arguments-out-of-order (W1114) Positional arguments appear to be out of order Emitted when the
caller’s argument names fully match the parameter names in the function signature but do not have
the same order.
c-extension-no-member (I1101) %s %r has no %r member%s, but source is unavailable. Consider
adding this module to extension-pkg-whitelist if you want to perform analysis based on run-time
introspection of living objects. Used when a variable is accessed for non-existent member of C
extension. Due to unavailability of source static analysis is impossible, but it may be performed by
introspecting living objects in run-time.

Variables checker

Verbatim name of the checker is variables.

Variables checker Options

init-import Tells whether we should check for unused import in __init__ files.
dummy-variables-rgx A regular expression matching the name of dummy variables (i.e. expected to not
be used).
Default: _+$|(_[a-zA-Z0-9_]*[a-zA-Z0-9]+?$)|dummy|^ignored_|^unused_

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additional-builtins List of additional names supposed to be defined in builtins. Remember that you
should avoid defining new builtins when possible.
callbacks List of strings which can identify a callback function by name. A callback name must start or
end with one of those strings.
Default: cb_,_cb
redefining-builtins-modules List of qualified module names which can have objects that can redefine
builtins.
Default: six.moves,past.builtins,future.builtins,builtins,io
ignored-argument-names Argument names that match this expression will be ignored. Default to name
with leading underscore.
Default: _.*|^ignored_|^unused_
allow-global-unused-variables Tells whether unused global variables should be treated as a violation.
Default: yes

Variables checker Messages

unpacking-non-sequence (E0633) Attempting to unpack a non-sequence%s Used when something

which is not a sequence is used in an unpack assignment
invalid-all-object (E0604) Invalid object %r in __all__, must contain only strings Used when an invalid
(non-string) object occurs in __all__.
no-name-in-module (E0611) No name %r in module %r Used when a name cannot be found in a mod-
ule.
undefined-variable (E0602) Undefined variable %r Used when an undefined variable is accessed.
undefined-all-variable (E0603) Undefined variable name %r in __all__ Used when an undefined vari-
able name is referenced in __all__.
used-before-assignment (E0601) Using variable %r before assignment Used when a local variable is
accessed before its assignment.
cell-var-from-loop (W0640) Cell variable %s defined in loop A variable used in a closure is defined in
a loop. This will result in all closures using the same value for the closed-over variable.
global-variable-undefined (W0601) Global variable %r undefined at the module level Used when a
variable is defined through the "global" statement but the variable is not defined in the module
scope.
self-cls-assignment (W0642) Invalid assignment to %s in method Invalid assignment to self or cls in
instance or class method respectively.
unbalanced-tuple-unpacking (W0632) Possible unbalanced tuple unpacking with sequence%s: left
side has %d label(s), right side has %d value(s) Used when there is an unbalanced tuple unpacking
in assignment
possibly-unused-variable (W0641) Possibly unused variable %r Used when a variable is defined but
might not be used. The possibility comes from the fact that locals() might be used, which could
consume or not the said variable
redefined-builtin (W0622) Redefining built-in %r Used when a variable or function override a built-in.
redefine-in-handler (W0623) Redefining name %r from %s in exception handler Used when an excep-
tion handler assigns the exception to an existing name

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redefined-outer-name (W0621) Redefining name %r from outer scope (line %s) Used when a variable’s
name hides a name defined in the outer scope.
unused-import (W0611) Unused %s Used when an imported module or variable is not used.
unused-argument (W0613) Unused argument %r Used when a function or method argument is not used.
unused-wildcard-import (W0614) Unused import %s from wildcard import Used when an imported
module or variable is not used from a ’from X import *’ style import.
unused-variable (W0612) Unused variable %r Used when a variable is defined but not used.
global-variable-not-assigned (W0602) Using global for %r but no assignment is done Used when a
variable is defined through the "global" statement but no assignment to this variable is done.
undefined-loop-variable (W0631) Using possibly undefined loop variable %r Used when a loop vari-
able (i.e. defined by a for loop or a list comprehension or a generator expression) is used outside the
loop.
global-statement (W0603) Using the global statement Used when you use the "global" statement to
update a global variable. Pylint just try to discourage this usage. That doesn’t mean you cannot use
it !
global-at-module-level (W0604) Using the global statement at the module level Used when you use the
"global" statement at the module level since it has no effect

5.5 Pylint and C extensions

If you are getting the dreaded no-member error, there is a possibility that either pylint found a bug in your code or
that it actually tries to lint a C extension module.
Linting C extension modules is not supported out of the box, especially since pylint has no way to get an AST object
out of the extension module.
But pylint actually has a mechanism which you might use in case you want to analyze C extensions. pylint has a flag,
called extension-pkg-whitelist, through which you can tell it to import that module and to build an AST from that
imported module:

$ pylint --extension-pkg-whitelist=your_c_extension

Be aware though that using this flag means that extensions are loaded into the active Python interpreter and may run
arbitrary code, which you may not want. This is the reason why we disable by default loading C extensions. In
case you do not want the hassle of passing C extensions module with this flag all the time, you can enable unsafe-
load-any-extension in your configuration file, which will build AST objects from all the C extensions that pylint
encounters:

$ pylint --unsafe-load-any-extension=y

Alternatively, since pylint emits a separate error for attributes that cannot be found in C extensions, c-extension-no-
member, you can disable this error for your project.

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CHAPTER 6

Development

6.1 Contributing

6.1.1 Bug reports, feedback

You think you have found a bug in Pylint? Well, this may be the case since Pylint is under heavy development!
Please take the time to check if it is already in the issue tracker at https://github.com/PyCQA/pylint
If you cannot find it in the tracker, create a new issue there or discuss your problem on the [email protected]
mailing list.
The code-quality mailing list is also a nice place to provide feedback about Pylint, since it is shared with other tools
that aim at improving the quality of python code.
Note that if you don’t find something you have expected in Pylint’s issue tracker, it may be because it is an issue with
one of its dependencies, namely astroid:
• https://github.com/PyCQA/astroid

6.1.2 Mailing lists

You can subscribe to this mailing list at http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/code-quality

Archives are available at http://mail.python.org/pipermail/code-quality/
Archives before April 2013 are available at http://lists.logilab.org/pipermail/python-projects/

6.1.3 Repository

Pylint is developed using the git distributed version control system.

You can clone Pylint and its dependencies from

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git clone https://github.com/PyCQA/pylint

git clone https://github.com/PyCQA/astroid

Got a change for Pylint? Below are a few steps you should take to make sure your patch gets accepted.
• Test your code
– Pylint is very well tested, with a high good code coverage. It has two types of tests, usual unittests and
functional tests.
The usual unittests can be found under /pylint/test directory and they can be used for testing almost any-
thing Pylint related. But for the ease of testing Pylint’s messages, we also have the concept of functional
tests.
– You should also run all the tests to ensure that your change isn’t breaking one. You can run the tests using
the tox package, as in:

python -m tox
python -m tox -epy36 # for Python 3.6 suite only
python -m tox -epylint # for running Pylint over Pylint's codebase
python -m tox -eformatting # for running formatting checks over Pylint's
˓→codebase

– It’s usually a good idea to run tox with --recreate. This is needed because the tox environment might
use an older version of astroid, which can cause various failures when you are running against the latest
pylint:

python -m tox --recreate # The entire tox environment is going to be recreated

– To run only a specific test suite, use a pattern for the test filename (without the .py extension), as in:

python -m tox -e py36 -- -k test_functional

python -m tox -e py36 -- -k \*func\*

– Since we just use pytest to run the tests, you can also use it as well, although we highly recommend using
tox instead:

pytest pylint -k test_functional

– pylint uses black and isort Python autoformatter for formatting its code. We have a pre-commit hook
which should take care of the autoformatting for you for when you are working on a patch. To enable it,
do the following:

* install pre-commit using pip install pre-commit

* then run pre-commit install in the pylint root directory to enable the git hooks.
• Add a short entry to the ChangeLog describing the change, except for internal implementation only changes.
Not usually required, but for changes other than small bugs we also add a couple of sentences in the release
document for that release, (What’s New section). For the release document we usually write some more details,
and it is also a good place to offer examples on how the new change is supposed to work.
• Add yourself to the CONTRIBUTORS file, if you are not already there.
• Write a comprehensive commit message
• Relate your change to an issue in the tracker if such an issue exists (see Closing issues via commit messages of
the GitHub documentation for more information on this)
• Document your change, if it is a non-trivial one.

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• Send a pull request from GitHub (see About pull requests for more insight about this topic)

6.1.4 Functional Tests

These are residing under ’/pylint/test/functional’ and they are formed of multiple components. First, each Python file
is considered to be a test case and it should be accompanied by a .txt file, having the same name, with the messages
that are supposed to be emitted by the given test file.
In the Python file, each line for which Pylint is supposed to emit a message has to be annotated with a comment in the
form # [message_symbol], as in:

a, b, c = 1 # [unbalanced-tuple-unpacking]

If multiple messages are expected on the same line, then this syntax can be used:

a, b, c = 1.test # [unbalanced-tuple-unpacking, no-member]

The syntax of the .txt file has to be this:

symbol:line_number:function_or_class:Expected message

For example, this is a valid message line:

abstract-class-instantiated:79:main:Abstract class 'BadClass' with abstract methods

˓→instantiated

If the Python file is expected to not emit any errors, then the .txt file has to be empty. If you need special control over
Pylint’s flag, you can also create a .rc file, which can have sections of Pylint’s configuration.
During development, it’s sometimes helpful to run all functional tests in your current environment in order to have
faster feedback. Run with:

python pylint/test/test_functional.py

6.1.5 Tips for Getting Started with Pylint Development

• Read the Technical Reference. It gives a short walkthrough of the pylint codebase and will help you identify
where you will need to make changes for what you are trying to implement.
• astroid.extract_node() is your friend. Most checkers are AST based, so you will likely need to interact
with astroid. A short example of how to use astroid.extract_node() is given here.
• When fixing a bug for a specific check, search the code for the warning message to find where the warning is
raised, and therefore where the logic for that code exists.

6.1.6 Building the documentation

We use tox for building the documentation:

$ tox -e docs

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76 Chapter 6. Development
CHAPTER 7

Frequently Asked Questions

7.1 1. About Pylint

7.1.1 1.1 What is Pylint?

Pylint is a static code checker, meaning it can analyse your code without actually running it. Pylint checks for errors,
tries to enforce a coding standard, and tries to enforce a coding style.

7.2 2. Installation

7.2.1 2.1 How do I install Pylint?

Everything should be explained on Installation.

7.2.2 2.2 What kind of versioning system does Pylint use?

Pylint uses the git distributed version control system. The URL of the repository is: https://github.com/PyCQA/pylint
. To get the latest version of Pylint from the repository, simply invoke

git clone https://github.com/PyCQA/pylint

7.2.3 2.3 What are Pylint’s dependencies?

Pylint depends on astroid and a couple of other packages. See the following section for details on what versions of
Python are supported.

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7.2.4 2.4 What versions of Python is Pylint supporting?

Since Pylint 2.X, the supported running environment is Python 3.5+.

That is, Pylint 2.X is still able to analyze Python 2 files, but some specific checks might not work, as they would
assume that their running environment was Python 2.
If you need to run pylint with Python 2, then Pylint 1.8 or 1.9 is for you. We will still do backports of bug fixes,
and possibly for various Python 3 compatibility checks, at least until 2020, after which we’ll stop support Python 2
altogether.

7.3 3. Running Pylint

7.3.1 3.1 Can I give pylint a file as an argument instead of a module?

Pylint expects the name of a package or module as its argument. As a convenience, you can give it a file name if it’s
possible to guess a module name from the file’s path using the python path. Some examples :
"pylint mymodule.py" should always work since the current working directory is automatically added on top of the
python path
"pylint directory/mymodule.py" will work if "directory" is a python package (i.e. has an __init__.py file), an implicit
namespace package or if "directory" is in the python path.
"pylint /whatever/directory/mymodule.py" will work if either:
• "/whatever/directory" is in the python path
• your cwd is "/whatever/directory"
• "directory" is a python package and "/whatever" is in the python path
• "directory" is an implicit namespace package and is in the python path.
• "directory" is a python package and your cwd is "/whatever" and so on...

7.3.2 3.2 Where is the persistent data stored to compare between successive runs?

Analysis data are stored as a pickle file in a directory which is localized using the following rules:
• value of the PYLINTHOME environment variable if set
• ".pylint.d" subdirectory of the user’s home directory if it is found (not always findable on Windows plat-
forms)
• ".pylint.d" directory in the current directory

7.3.3 3.3 How do I find the option name (for pylintrc) corresponding to a specific
command line option?

You can always generate a sample pylintrc file with –generate-rcfile Every option present on the command line before
this will be included in the rc file
For example:

pylint --disable=bare-except,invalid-name --class-rgx='[A-Z][a-z]+' --generate-rcfile

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7.3.4 3.4 I’d rather not run Pylint from the command line. Can I integrate it with my
editor?

Much probably. Read Editor and IDE integration

7.4 4. Message Control

7.4.1 4.1 Is it possible to locally disable a particular message?

Yes, this feature has been added in Pylint 0.11. This may be done by adding "#pylint: disable=some-message,another-
one" at the desired block level or at the end of the desired line of code

7.4.2 4.2 Is there a way to disable a message for a particular module only?

Yes, you can disable or enable (globally disabled) messages at the module level by adding the corresponding option in
a comment at the top of the file:

# pylint: disable=wildcard-import, method-hidden

# pylint: enable=too-many-lines

7.4.3 4.3 How can I tell Pylint to never check a given module?

With Pylint < 0.25, add "#pylint: disable-all" at the beginning of the module. Pylint 0.26.1 and up have renamed that
directive to "#pylint: skip-file" (but the first version will be kept for backward compatibility).
In order to ease finding which modules are ignored an Information-level message file-ignored is emitted. With recent
versions of Pylint, if you use the old syntax, an additional deprecated-disable-all message is emitted.

7.4.4 4.4 Do I have to remember all these numbers?

No, starting from 0.25.3, you can use symbolic names for messages:

# pylint: disable=fixme, line-too-long

7.4.5 4.5 I have a callback function where I have no control over received argu-
ments. How do I avoid getting unused argument warnings?

Prefix (ui) the callback’s name by cb_, as in cb_onclick(...). By doing so arguments usage won’t be checked. Another
solution is to use one of the names defined in the "dummy-variables" configuration variable for unused argument ("_"
and "dummy" by default).

7.4.6 4.6 What is the format of the configuration file?

Pylint uses ConfigParser from the standard library to parse the configuration file. It means that if you need to disable
a lot of messages, you can use tricks like:

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# disable wildcard-import, method-hidden and too-many-lines because I do

# not want it
disable= wildcard-import,
method-hidden,
too-many-lines

7.4.7 4.7 Why are there a bunch of messages disabled by default?

pylint does have some messages disabled by default, either because they are prone to false positives or that they are
opinionated enough for not being included as default messages. But most of the disabled messages are from the Python
3 porting checker, which is disabled by default. It needs special activation with the --py3k flag.

7.5 5. Classes and Inheritance

7.5.1 5.1 When is Pylint considering a class as an abstract class?

A class is considered as an abstract class if at least one of its methods is doing nothing but raising NotImplemented-
Error.

7.5.2 5.2 How do I avoid "access to undefined member" messages in my mixin

classes?

To do so you have to set the ignore-mixin-members option to "yes" (this is the default value) and to name your mixin
class with a name which ends with "mixin" (whatever case).

7.6 6. Troubleshooting

7.6.1 6.1 Pylint gave my code a negative rating out of ten. That can’t be right!

Even though the final rating Pylint renders is nominally out of ten, there’s no lower bound on it. By default, the
formula to calculate score is

10.0 - ((float(5 * error + warning + refactor + convention) / statement) * 10)

However, this option can be changed in the Pylint rc file. If having negative values really bugs you, you can set the
formula to be the maximum of 0 and the above expression.

7.6.2 6.2 I think I found a bug in Pylint. What should I do?

Read Bug reports, feedback

7.6.3 6.3 I have a question about Pylint that isn’t answered here.

Read Mailing lists

80 Chapter 7. Frequently Asked Questions

CHAPTER 8

Some projects using Pylint

The following projects are known to use Pylint to help develop better Python code:
• edX (https://github.com/edx)
• qutebrowser (https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser)
• Odoo (https://github.com/OCA)
• Landscape.io (https://github.com/landscapeio/)
• Codacy (https://github.com/Codacy/)
• SaltStack (https://github.com/saltstack)
• CodeFactor (https://github.com/codefactor-io)
• many more...

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82 Chapter 8. Some projects using Pylint

CHAPTER 9

Support

Professional support for pylint is available as part of the Tidelift Subscription. Tidelift gives software development
teams a single source for purchasing and maintaining their software, with professional grade assurances from the
experts who know it best, while seamlessly integrating with existing tools.

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84 Chapter 9. Support
CHAPTER 10

What’s New in Pylint

High level descriptions of the most important changes between major Pylint versions.

10.1 What’s New in Pylint 2.4

Release 2.4
Date 2019-09-24

10.1.1 Summary – Release highlights

10.1.2 New checkers

• import-outside-toplevel
This check warns when modules are imported from places other than a module toplevel, e.g. inside a function
or a class.
• Added a new check, consider-using-sys-exit
This check is emitted when we detect that a quit() or exit() is invoked instead of sys.exit(), which is the preferred
way of exiting in program.
Close #2925
• Added a new check, arguments-out-of-order
This check warns if you have arguments with names that match those in a function’s signature but you are
passing them in to the function in a different order.
Close #2975
• Added new checks, no-else-break and no-else-continue
These checks highlight unnecessary else and elif blocks after break and continue statements.

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Close #2327
• Added unnecessary-comprehension that detects unnecessary comprehensions.
This check is emitted when pylint finds list-, set- or dict-comprehensions, that are unnecessary and can be
rewritten with the list-, set- or dict-constructors.
Close #2905
• Added a new check, invalid-overridden-method
This check is emitted when we detect that a method is overridden as a property or a property is overridden as a
method. This can indicate a bug in the application code that will trigger a runtime error.
Close #2670
• Added a new check, redeclared-assigned-name
This check is emitted when pylint detects that a name was assigned one or multiple times in the same assign-
ment, which indicate a potential bug.
Close #2898
• Added a new check, self-assigning-variable
This check is emitted when we detect that a variable is assigned to itself, which might indicate a potential bug
in the code application.
For example, the following would raise this warning:

def new_a(attr, attr2):

a_inst = Aclass()
a_inst.attr2 = attr2
# should be: a_inst.attr = attr, but have a typo
attr = attr
return a_inst

Close #2930
• Added a new check property-with-parameters which detects when a property has more than a single
argument.
Close #3006
• Added subprocess-run-check to handle subprocess.run without explicitly set check keyword.
Close #2848
• We added a new check message dict-iter-missing-items. This is emitted when trying to iterate
through a dict in a for loop without calling its .items() method.
Closes #2761
• We added a new check message missing-parentheses-for-call-in-test. This is emitted in case
a call to a function is made inside a test but it misses parentheses.
• A new check class-variable-slots-conflict was added.
This check is emitted when pylint finds a class variable that conflicts with a slot name, which would raise a
ValueError at runtime.
For example, the following would raise an error:

class A:
__slots__ = ('first', 'second')
first = 1

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• A new check preferred-module was added.

This check is emitted when pylint finds an imported module that has a preferred replacement listed in
preferred-modules.
For example, you can set the preferred modules as xml:defusedxml,json:ujson to make pylint
suggest using defusedxml instead of xml and ujson rather than json.
• A new extension broad_try_clause was added.
This extension enforces a configurable maximum number of statements inside of a try clause. This facilitates
enforcing PEP 8’s guidelines about try / except statements and the amount of code in the try clause.
You can enable this extension using --load-plugins=pylint.extensions.broad_try_clause
and you can configure the amount of statements in a try statement using --max-try-statements.

10.1.3 Other Changes

• Don’t emit protected-access when a single underscore prefixed attribute is used inside a special method
Close #1802
• len-as-condition now only fires when a len(x) call is made without an explicit comparison.
The message and description accompanying this checker has been changed reflect this new behavior, by explic-
itly asking to either rely on the fact that empty sequence are false or to compare the length with a scalar.
OK:

if len(x) == 0:
pass

while not len(x) == 0:

pass

assert len(x) > 5, message

KO:

if not len(x):
pass

while len(x) and other_cond:

pass

assert len(x), message

• A file is now read from stdin if the --from-stdin flag is used on the command line. In addition to the
--from-stdin flag a (single) file name needs to be specified on the command line, which is needed for the
report.
• The checker for ungrouped imports is now more permissive.
The import can now be sorted alphabetically by import style. This makes pylint compatible with isort.
The following imports do not trigger an ungrouped-imports anymore

import unittest
import zipfile
from unittest import TestCase
from unittest.mock import MagicMock

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• The checker for missing return documentation is now more flexible.

The following does not trigger a missing-return-doc anymore

def my_func(self):
"""This is a docstring.

Returns
-------
:obj:`list` of :obj:`str`
List of strings
"""
return ["hi", "bye"] #@

• signature-mutators CLI and config option was added.

With this option, users can choose to ignore too-many-function-args, unexpected-keyword-arg, and no-value-for-
parameter for functions decorated with decorators that change the signature of a decorated function.
For example a test may want to make use of hypothesis. Adding hypothesis.extra.numpy.arrays to signature_mutators
would mean that no-value-for-parameter would not be raised for:

@given(img=arrays(dtype=np.float32, shape=(3, 3, 3, 3)))

def test_image(img):
...

• Allow the option of f-strings as a valid logging string formatting method.

logging-fstring–interpolation has been merged into logging-format-interpolation to allow the logging-format-style
option to control which logging string format style is valid. To allow this, a new fstr value is valid for the logging-
format-style option.
• --list-msgs-enabled command was added.
When enabling/disabling several messages and groups in a config file, it can be unclear which messages are actually
enabled and which are disabled. This new command produces the final resolved lists of enabled/disabled messages,
sorted by symbol but with the ID provided for use with --help-msg.

10.2 What’s New in Pylint 2.3

Release 2.3
Date 2019-02-27

10.2.1 Summary – Release highlights

• This release improves the performance of the 2.X series after it was affected by a performance regression a
couple of releases ago.

10.2.2 New checkers

• We added a new check message wrong-exception-operation. This is emitted when an operation is

done against an exception, but the operation is not valid for the exception in question. Usually emitted when
having binary operations between exceptions in except handlers.
Closes #2494

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• We added a new no-else-raise warning similar to no-else-return

Closes #2558
• We added a new option check-str-concat-over-line-jumps to check
implicit-str-concat-in-sequence over multiple lines.

10.2.3 Other Changes

Quite a lot of bug fixes and improvements went into this release, here’s a handful of them. For the full changes, check
the Changelog.
• We no longer emit *-not-iterating checks for builtins consumed by itertools
• We fixed some false positives for no-self-argument and unsubscriptable-object when using
__class_getitem__ (new in Python 3.7)
• pylint now supports Ellipsis as a synonym for pass statements.
• fixme gets triggered only on comments.
• pylint exempts starred unpacking from *-not-iterating Python 3 checks.
• compare-to-zero is now less zealous by checking against equality and identity.
‘‘yield from‘‘ is exempted from ‘‘-not-iterating‘‘ Python 3 checks.
• A false positive with not-async-context-manager caused by not understanding contextlib.
asynccontextmanager was fixed.
• We refactored bad-reversed-sequence to account for more objects that can define __reversed__.
• no-member is now emitted for enums when they lack a member.
• Plugins can now use the load_configuration() hook. This hook is executed after configuration is loaded
to prevent overwriting plugin specific configuration via user-based configuration.
• There’s a new command line option list-groups for listing all the check groups pylint knows about.
This is useful to know what groups you can disable or enable individually.

10.3 What’s New in Pylint 2.2

Release 2.2
Date 2018-11-25

10.3.1 Summary – Release highlights

10.3.2 New checkers

• String checker now reports format string type mismatches.

• duplicate-string-formatting-argument was added for detecting duplicate string formatting argu-
ments that should be passed instead as named arguments.
• logging-format-style is a new option for the logging checker for usage of str.format() style format
strings in calls to loggers.

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It accepts two options: --logging-format-style=old for using % style formatting, which is the as-
sumed default, and --logging-format-style=new for using {} style formatting.
• implicit-str-concat-in-sequence detects string concatenation inside lists, sets & tuples.
Example of code that would generate such warning:

woops = ('a', 'b' 'c')

10.3.3 Other Changes

• try-except-raise checker now handles multilevel inheritance hirerachy for exceptions correctly.
Close #2484
• Ignore import x.y.z as z cases for checker useless-import-alias.
• unnecessary-pass is now also emitted when a function or class contains only docstring and pass statement, in
which case, docstring is enough for empty definition.
• Fix false positive undefined-variable and used-before-assignment with nonlocal keyword us-
age.
• Fix exceptions being raised when one of the params is not a ClassDef for checkers.utils.
is_subclass_of().
• pylint now picks the latest value from the inferred values of the exception that gets raised, when looking for
raising-non-exception. This helps when reusing a variable name for multiple types, since pylint
was picking just the first inferred value, leading to spurious false positives.
Close #2431
• pylint used to emit a not-an-iterable error when looking at coroutines built with asyncio.
coroutine. This is no longer the case as we handle coroutines explicitly.
Close #996
• pylint used to emit a unused-variable error if unused import was found in the function. Now instead
of unused-variable, unused-import is emitted.
Close #2421

10.4 What’s New in Pylint 2.1

Release 2.1
Date 2018-08-01

10.4.1 Summary – Release highlights

• This release mostly includes fixes for bugs found after the launch of 2.0.

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10.4.2 New checkers

• A new check was added, misplaced-format-function.

This message is emitted when pylint detects that a format function is called on non str object. This can occur
due to wrong placement of closing bracket, e.g

print('value: {}').format(123) # bad

print('value: {}'.format(123)) # good

10.4.3 Other Changes

• try-except-raise check was demoted from an error to a warning, as part of issue #2323.
• Correctly handle the new name of the Python implementation of the abc module.
In Python 3.7, the abc module has both a C implementation as well as a Python one, but the Python implemen-
tation has a different file name that what pylint was expecting, resulting in some checks getting confused.
• Modules with __getattr__ are exempted by default from no-member
There’s no easy way to figure out if a module has a particular member when the said module uses
__getattr__, which is a new addition to Python 3.7. Instead we assume the safe thing to do, in the same
way we do for classes, and skip those modules from checking.
• invalid name is no longer triggered for function and attribute names longer than 30 characters. The upper
limit was removed completely.
• Fix false-positive undefined-variable for self referential class name in lamdbas
• no-else-return also specifies the type of the branch that is causing the error.
• Fixed inconsistent behaviour for bad-continuation on first line of file.
• Fixed a bug where pylint was not able to disable certain messages on the last line through the global disable
option.
• pylint no longer emits useless-return when it finds a single statement that is the return itself
We still want to be explicit when a function is supposed to return an optional value; even though pass could
still work, it’s not explicit enough and the function might look like it’s missing an implementation.
• Fixed a bug where pylint was crashing when being unable to infer the value of an argument to next()
• pylint no longer emit not-an-iterable when dealing with async iterators.
• pylint gained the ability to specify a default docstring type for when the check cannot guess the type
For this we added a --default-docstring-type command line option.

10.5 What’s New in Pylint 2.0

Release 2.0
Date 2018-07-15

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10.5.1 Summary – Release highlights

• Dropped support for Python 2. This release will work only on Python 3.4+.
If you need to use pylint with Python 2, you can use Pylint 1.9+. We’ll continue to do bug releases until
2020, when Python 2 goes officially EOL. pylint will gain the ability to analyze Python 2 files, but some
checks might not work as they will assume that their running environment is Python 2.
• Given the dropping of Python 2, the Python 3 porting mode (enabled via --py3k) can now also run with Python
3.
The porting mode used to be a no-op on Python 3, but most of the messages can now be emitted when the
running interpreter is Python 3. The only messages that won’t be emitted are those that rely on a particular
syntax specific to Python 2, for instance print as a statement.

10.5.2 New checkers

• A new check was added, useless-object-inheritance.

This refactoring message is emitted when pylint detects that a class inherits from object, which is redundant as
in Python 3, every class implicitly inherits from object.

class A(object):
pass

class A: # better
pass

• A new check was added, comparison-with-callable.

This refactoring message is emitted when pylint detects that a comparison with a callable was made, which
might suggest that some parenthesis were omitted, resulting in potential unwanted behaviour.

def foo():
return None

def goo():
return None

if foo == 786: # bad

pass

if foo() == 786: # good

pass

• A new check was added, chained-comparison.

This refactoring message is emitted if a boolean operation can be simplified by chaining some of its operations.
check below example:

if a < b and b < c:

pass

if a < b < c: # better

pass

• A new check was added, useless-import-alias.

This refactoring message is emitted when an import alias does not rename the original package.

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import numpy as numpy # bad

import numpy as np # good
from collection import OrderedDict as OrderedDict # bad
from collection import OrderedDict as ordered_dict # good

• A new check was added, comparison-with-itself.

This refactoring message is emitted when a variable is compared against itself.

if variable == variable: # bad

pass

• A new check was added, consider-using-in.

This refactoring message is emitted when a variable is compared against multiple values concatenated by ors
instead of using the faster, more idiomatic "in" check.

if variable == 1 or variable == 2 or variable == 3: # bad

pass

if variable in (1, 2, 3): # good

pass

• A new check was added, consider-using-get.

This refactoring message is emitted when manually checking if a key is in a dictionary and getting its value if it
is (and optionally a default if not) instead of the more idiomatic dict.get.

if 'key' in dictionary: # bad

variable = dictionary['key']
else:
variable = 'default'

variable = dictionary.get('key', 'default') # good

• A new check was added, consider-using-join.

This refactoring message is emitted when using a for loop over an iterable to join strings instead of the faster,
less memory consuming and more idiomatic str.join(sequence).

result = '' # bad

for number in ['1', '2', '3']:
result += number

result = ''.join(['1', '2', '3']) # good

• New useless-return message when function or method ends with a "return" or "return None" statement
and this is the only return statement in the body.
• New use-symbolic-message-instead message when a message is activated or deactivated by id in-
stead of symbol. The use of symbol is more explicit and easier to remind.
• A new check was added, consider-swap-variables.
This refactoring message is emitted when using a temporary variable in order to swap the values of two variables
instead of the shorter, more idiomatic approach with tuple-unpacking.
Instead of a temporary variable, the one-line syntax with commas should be used.
See this style guide document or this swap values presentation for details.

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temp = a # the wrong way

a = b
b = temp

a, b = b, a # the right way

• Two new checks, invalid-envvar-value and invalid-envvar-default, were added.

The former is trigger whenever pylint detects that environment variable manipulation functions uses a different
type than strings, while the latter is emitted whenever the said functions are using a default variable of different
type than expected.
• A new check was added, subprocess-popen-preexec-fn,
This refactoring message is emitted when using the keyword argument preexec_fn when creating subpro-
cess.Popen instances which may be unsafe when used in the presence of threads.
See subprocess.Popen for full warning details.
• New try-except-raise message when an except handler block has a bare raise statement as its first
operator or the exception type being raised is the same as the one being handled.
• New possibly-unused-variable check added.
This is similar to unused-variable, the only difference is that it is emitted when we detect a locals()
call in the scope of the unused variable. The locals() call could potentially use the said variable, by
consuming all values that are present up to the point of the call. This new check allows to disable this
error when the user intentionally uses locals() to consume everything.
For instance, the following code will now trigger this new error:

def func():
some_value = some_call()
return locals()

• New unhashable-dict-key check added to detect dict lookups using unhashable keys such as lists or
dicts.
• New self-cls-assignment warning check added.
This is warning if the first argument of an instance/ class method gets assigned

class Foo(object):
def foo(self, bar):
self = bar

• New verbose mode option --verbose to display of extra non-checker-related output. Disabled by default.
• Two new checks were added for recommending dict and set comprehensions where possible.
These two checks are going to flag the following examples:

dict([(k, v) for (k, v) in ...]) # better as {k: v for k, v in ...}

set([k for k in ...]) # better as {k for k in ...}

10.5.3 Other Changes

• A couple of performance improvements brought to astroid should make pylint should be a bit faster as
well.

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We added a new flag, max_inferable_values on astroid.MANAGER for limitting the maximum

amount of values that astroid can infer when inferring values. This change should improve the performance
when dealing with large frameworks such as django. You can also control this behaviour with pylint
--limit-inference-results
We also rewrote how nodes_of_class and get_children methods operate which should result in a performance
boost for a couple of checks.
• Fix a false positive inconsistent-return-statements message when exception is raised inside an
else statement.
• Don’t warn for missing-type-doc and/or missing-return-type-doc, if type annotations exist on
the function signature for a parameter and/or return type.
• Fix a false positive inconsistent-return-statements message when if statement is inside try/except.
• Fix a false positive inconsistent-return-statements message when while loop are used.
• Fix emission of false positive no-member message for class with "private" attributes whose name is mangled.
• Fix unused-argument false positives with overshadowed variable in dictionary comprehension.
• Fixing false positive inconsistent-return-statements when never returning functions are used (i.e
such as sys.exit).
• Fix false positive inconsistent-return-statements message when a function is defined under an if
statement.
• Fix false positive inconsistent-return-statements message by avoiding useless exception inference
if the exception is not handled.
• Fix false positive undefined-variable for lambda argument in class definitions
• Suppress false-positive not-callable messages from certain staticmethod descriptors
• Expand ignored-argument-names include starred arguments and keyword arguments
• singleton-comparison will suggest better boolean conditions for negative conditions.
• undefined-loop-variable takes in consideration non-empty iterred objects before emitting.
For instance, if the loop iterable is not empty, this check will no longer be emitted.
• Enum classes no longer trigger too-few-methods
• Special methods now count towards too-few-methods, and are considered part of the public API. They are
still not counted towards the number of methods for too-many-methods.
• docparams extension allows abstract methods to document returns documentation even if the de-
fault implementation does not return something. They also no longer need to document raising a
NotImplementedError.
• Skip wildcard import check for __init__.py.
• Don’t warn ’useless-super-delegation’ if the subclass method has different type annotations.
• Don’t warn that a global variable is unused if it is defined by an import

def func():
global sys
import sys

• Added basic support for postponed evaluation of function annotations.

If pylint detects the corresponding from __future__ import annotations import, it will not emit
used-before-assignment and undefined-variable in the cases triggered by the annotations.

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More details on the postponed evaluation of annotations can be read in PEP 563.
• A new command line option was added, --exit-zero, for the use of continuous integration scripts which
abort if a command returns a non-zero status code. If the option is specified, and Pylint runs successfully, it will
exit with 0 regardless of the number of lint issues detected.
Configuration errors, parse errors, and calling Pylint with invalid command-line options all still return a non-zero
error code, even if --exit-zero is specified.
• Don’t emit unused-import anymore for typing imports used in type comments. For instance, in the follow-
ing example pylint used to complain that Any and List are not used, while they should be considered used by
a type checker.

from typing import Any, List

a = 1 # type: List[Any]

• Fix false positive line-too-long for commented lines at the end of module
• Fix emitting useless-super-delegation when changing the default value of keyword arguments.
• Support typing.TYPE_CHECKING for unused-import errors
When modules are imported under typing.TYPE_CHECKING guard, pylint will no longer emit unused-
import.
• Fix false positive unused-variable in lambda default arguments
• assignment-from-no-return considers methods as well as functions.
If you have a method that doesn’t return a value, but later on you assign a value to a function call to that method
(so basically it will be None), then pylint is going to emit an assignment-from-no-return error.
• A new flag was added, --ignore-none which controls the no-member behaviour with respect to None
values.
Previously pylint was not emitting no-member if it inferred that the owner of an attribute access is a None
value. In some cases, this might actually cause bugs, so if you want to check for None values as well, pass
--ignore-none=n to pylint.
• Fix false-positive bad-continuation for with statements
• Fix false-positive bad-whitespace message for typing annoatations with ellipses in them
• Fix false-positive undefined-variable for nested lambdas

10.6 What’s New In Pylint 1.9

Release 1.9
Date 2018-05-15

10.6.1 Summary – Release highlights

• None so far

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10.6.2 New checkers

• A new Python 3 checker was added to warn about the removed operator.div function.
• A new Python 3 checker was added to warn about accessing functions that have been moved from the urllib
module in corresponding subpackages, such as urllib.request.

from urllib import urlencode

Instead the previous code should use urllib.parse or six.moves to import a module in a Python 2 and 3
compatible fashion:

from six.moves.urllib.parse import urlencode

To have this working on Python 3 as well, please use the six library:

six.reraise(Exception, "value", tb)

• A new check was added to warn about using unicode raw string literals. This is a syntax error in Python 3:

a = ur'...'

• Added a new deprecated-sys-function check, emitted when accessing removed sys members.
• Added xreadlines-attribute check, emitted when the xreadlines() attribute is accessed on a file object.
• Added two new Python 3 porting checks, exception-escape and comprehension-escape
These two are emitted whenever pylint detects that a variable defined in the said blocks is used outside of the
given block. On Python 3 these values are deleted.

try:
1/0
except ZeroDivisionError as exc:
...
print(exc) # This will raise a NameError on Python 3

[i for i in some_iterator if some_condition(i)]

print(i) # This will raise a NameError on Python 3

10.6.3 Other Changes

• defaultdict and subclasses of dict are now handled for dict-iter-* checks. That means that the following code
will now emit warnings for when iteritems and friends are accessed:

some_dict = defaultdict(list)
...
some_dict.iterkeys()

• Enum classes no longer trigger too-few-methods

• Special methods now count towards too-few-methods, and are considered part of the public API. They are still
not counted towards the number of methods for too-many-methods.
• docparams allows abstract methods to document returns documentation even if the default implementation does
not return something. They also no longer need to document raising a NotImplementedError.

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10.7 What’s New In Pylint 1.8

Release 1.8
Date 2017-12-15

10.7.1 Summary – Release highlights

• None so far

10.7.2 New checkers

• A new check was added, shallow-copy-environ.

This warning message is emitted when shallow copy of os.environ is created. Shallow copy of os.environ doesn’t
work as people may expect. os.environ is not a dict object but rather a proxy object, so any changes made on
copy may have unexpected effects on os.environ
Instead of copy.copy(os.environ) method os.environ.copy() should be used.
See https://bugs.python.org/issue15373 for details.

import copy
import os
wrong_env_copy = copy.copy(os.environ) # will emit pylint warning
wrong_env_copy['ENV_VAR'] = 'new_value' # changes os.environ
assert os.environ['ENV_VAR'] == 'new_value'

good_env_copy = dict(os.environ) # the right way

good_env_copy['ENV_VAR'] = 'different_value' # doesn't change os.environ
assert os.environ['ENV_VAR'] == 'new_value'

• A new check was added, keyword-arg-before-vararg.

This warning message is emitted when a function is defined with a keyword argument appearing before variable-
length positional arguments (*args). This may lead to args list getting modified if keyword argument’s value is
not provided in the function call assuming it will take default value provided in the definition.

def foo(a, b=3, *args):

print(a, b, args)

# Case1: a=0, b=2, args=(4,5)

foo(0,2,4,5) # 0 2 (4,5) ==> Observed values are same as expected values

# Case2: a=0, b=<default_value>, args=(4,5)

foo(0,4,5) # 0 4 (5,) ==> args list got modified as well as the observed value of
˓→b

# Case3: Syntax Error if tried as follows

foo(0,b=2,4,5) # syntax error

• A new check was added, simplify-boolean-expression.

This message is emitted when consider-using-ternary check would emit not equivalent code, due to
truthy element being falsy in boolean context.

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value = condition and False or other_value

This flawed construct may be simplified to:

value = other_value

• A new check was added, bad-thread-instantiation.

This message is emitted when the threading.Thread class does not receive the target argument, but receives just
one argument, which is by default the group parameter.
In the following example, the instantiation will fail, which is definitely not desired:

import threading
threading.Thread(lambda: print(1)) # Oups, this is the group parameter

• A new Python 3 checker was added to warn about accessing functions that have been removed from the itertools
module izip, imap, iflter, izip_longest, and ifilterfalse.

from itertools import izip

print(list(izip([1, 2], [3])))

Instead use six.moves to import a Python 2 and Python 3 compatible function:

from six.moves import zip

print(list(zip([1, 2], [3])))

• A new Python 3 checker was added to warn about accessing deprecated fields from the types module like
ListType or IntType

from types import ListType

print(isinstance([], ListType))

Instead use the declarations in the builtin namespace:

print(isinstance([], list))

• A new Python 3 checker was added to warn about declaring a next method that would have implemented the
Iterator protocol in Python 2 but is now a normal method in Python 3.

class Foo(object):
def next(self):
return 42

Instead implement a __next__ method and use six.Iterator as a base class or alias next to __next__:

class Foo(object):
def __next__(self):
return 42
next = __next__

• Three new Python 3 checkers were added to warn about using dictionary methods in non-iterating contexts.
For example, the following are returning iterators in Python 3:

.. code-block:: python

d = {} d.keys()[0] d.items()[0] d.values() + d.keys()

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• A new Python 3 porting check was added, non-ascii-bytes-literals

This message is emitted whenever we detect that a bytes string contain non-ASCII characters, which results in
a SyntaxError on Python 3.
• A new warning, raising-format-tuple, will catch situations where the intent was likely raising an ex-
ception with a formatted message string, but the actual code did omit the formatting and instead passes template
string and value parameters as separate arguments to the exception constructor. So it detects things like

raise SomeError('message about %s', foo)

raise SomeError('message about {}', foo)

which likely were meant instead as

raise SomeError('message about %s' % foo)

raise SomeError('message about {}'.format(foo))

This warning can be ignored on projects which deliberately use lazy formatting of messages in all user-facing
exception handlers.
• Following the recommendations of PEP479 ,a new Python 3.0 checker was added to warn about raising a
StopIteration inside a generator. Raising a StopIteration inside a generator may be due a direct
call to raise StopIteration:

def gen_stopiter():
yield 1
yield 2
yield 3
raise StopIteration

Instead use a simple return statement

def gen_stopiter():
yield 1
yield 2
yield 3
return

Raising a StopIteration may also be due to the call to next function with a generator as argument:

def gen_next_raises_stopiter():
g = gen_ok()
while True:
yield next(g)

In this case, surround the call to next with a try/except block:

def gen_next_raises_stopiter():
g = gen_ok()
while True:
try:
yield next(g)
except StopIteration:
return

The check about raising a StopIteration inside a generator is also valid if the exception raised inherit from
StopIteration. Close #1385

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• A new Python checker was added to warn about using a + operator inside call of logging methods when one of
the operands is a literal string:
import logging
var = "123"
logging.log(logging.INFO, "Var: " + var)

Instead use formatted string and positional arguments :

import logging
var = "123"
logging.log(logging.INFO, "Var: %s", var)

• A new Python checker was added to warn about inconsistent-return-statements. A function or a

method has inconsistent return statements if it returns both explicit and implicit values :
def mix_implicit_explicit_returns(arg):
if arg < 10:
return True
elif arg < 20:
return

According to PEP8, if any return statement returns an expression, any return statements where no value is
returned should explicitly state this as return None, and an explicit return statement should be present at the end
of the function (if reachable). Thus, the previous function should be written:
def mix_implicit_explicit_returns(arg):
if arg < 10:
return True
elif arg < 20:
return None

Close #1267

10.7.3 Other Changes

• Fixing u” string in superfluous-parens message.

• Configuration options of invalid name checker are significantly redesigned. Predefined rules
for common naming styles were introduced. For typical setups, user friendly options like
--function-naming-style=camelCase may be used in place of hand-written regular expressions. De-
fault linter config enforce PEP8-compatible naming style. See documentation for details.
• Raise meaningful exception in case of invalid reporter class (output format) being selected.
• The docparams extension now allows a property docstring to document both the property and the setter. There-
fore setters can also have no docstring.
• The docparams extension now understands property type syntax.
class Foo(object):
@property
def foo(self):
"""My Sphinx style docstring description.

:type: int
(continues on next page)

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(continued from previous page)

"""
return 10

class Foo(object):
@property
def foo(self):
"""int: My Numpy and Google docstring style description."""
return 10

• In case of --output-format=json, the dictionary returned holds a new key-value pair. The key is
message-id and the value the message id.
• Spelling checker has a new configuration parameter max-spelling-suggestions, which affects maxi-
mum count of suggestions included in emitted message.
• The invalid-name check contains the name of the template that caused the failure.
For the given code, pylint used to emit invalid-name in the form Invalid constant name var,
without offering any context why var is not such a good name.
With this change, it is now more clear what should be improved for a name to be accepted according to its
corresponding template.
• New configuration flag, suggestion-mode was introduced. When enabled, pylint would attempt to emit
user-friendly suggestions instead of spurious errors for some known false-positive scenarios. Flag is enabled by
default.
• superfluous-parens is no longer wrongly emitted for logical statements involving in operator (see ex-
ample below for what used to be false-positive).

foo = None
if 'bar' in (foo or {}):
pass

• Redefinition of dummy function is now possible. function-redefined message won’t be emitted anymore
when dummy functions are redefined.
• missing-param-doc and missing-type-doc are no longer emitted when Args and Keyword Args
are mixed in Google docstring.
• Fix of false positive useless-super-delegation message when parameters default values are different
from those used in the base class.
• Fix of false positive useless-else-on-loop message when break statements are deeply nested inside
loop.
• The Python 3 porting checker no longer emits multiple no-absolute-import per file.
• The Python 3 porting checker respects disabled checkers found in the config file.
• Modules, classes, or methods consist of compound statements that exceed the docstring-min-length are
now correctly emitting missing-docstring
• Fix no wrong-import-order message emitted on ordering of first and third party libraries. With this fix,
pylint distinguishes first and third party modules when checking import order.
• Fix the ignored pylint disable=fixme directives for comments following the last statement in a file.
• Fix line-too-long message deactivated by wrong disable directive. The directive disable=fixme
doesn’t deactivate anymore the emission of line-too-long message for long commented lines.

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• If the rcfile specified on the command line doesn’t exist, then an IOError exception is raised.
• Fix the wrong scope of disable= directive after a commented line. For example when a
disable=line-too-long directive is at the end of a long commented line, it no longer disables the emis-
sion of line-too-long message for lines that follow.

10.8 What’s New In Pylint 1.7

Release 1.7
Date 2017-04-13

10.8.1 Summary – Release highlights

• None yet.

10.8.2 New checkers

• single-string-used-for-slots check was added, which is used whenever a class is using a single
string as a slot value. While this is technically not a problem per se, it might trip users when manipulating the
slots value as an iterable, which would in turn iterate over characters of the slot value. In order to be more
straight-forward, always try to use a container such as a list or a tuple for defining slot values.
• We added a new check, literal-comparison, which is used whenever pylint can detect a comparison to
a literal. This is usually not what we want and, potentially, error prone. For instance, in the given example, the
first string comparison returns true, since smaller strings are interned by the interpreter, while for larger ones, it
will return False:

mystring = "ok"
if mystring is "ok": # Returns true
# do stuff

mystring = "a" * 1000

if mystring is ("a" * 1000): # This will return False
# do stuff

Instead of using the is operator, you should use the == operator for this use case.
• We added a new refactoring message, consider-merging-isinstance, which is emitted whenever we
can detect that consecutive isinstance calls can be merged together. For instance, in this example, we can merge
the first two isinstance calls:

# $ cat a.py
if isinstance(x, int) or isinstance(x, float):
pass
if isinstance(x, (int, float)) or isinstance(x, str):
pass
# $ pylint a.py
# R: 1, 0: Consider merging these isinstance calls to isinstance(x, (float,
˓→int)) (consider-merging-isinstance)

# R: 3, 0: Consider merging these isinstance calls to isinstance(x, (int, float,

˓→str)) (consider-merging-isinstance)

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• A new error check was added, invalid-metaclass, which is used whenever pylint can detect that a given
class is using a metaclass which is invalid for the purpose of the class. This usually might indicate a problem in
the code, rather than something done on purpose.

# Needs to inherit from *type* in order to be valid

class SomeClass(object):
...

class MyClass(metaclass=SomeClass):
pass

• A new warning was added, useless-super-delegation, which is used whenever we can detect that an
overridden method is useless, relying on super() delegation to do the same thing as another method from the
MRO.
For instance, in this example, the first two methods are useless, since they do the exact same thing as the methods
from the base classes, while the next two methods are not, since they do some extra operations with the passed
arguments.

class Impl(Base):

def __init__(self, param1, param2):

super(Impl, self).__init__(param1, param2)

def useless(self, first, second):

return super(Impl, self).useless(first, second)

def not_useless(self, first, **kwargs):

debug = kwargs.pop('debug', False)
if debug:
...
return super(Impl, self).not_useless(first, **kwargs)

def not_useless_1(self, first, *args):

return super(Impl, self).not_useless_1(first + some_value, *args)

• A new warning was added, len-as-condition, which is used whenever we detect that a condition uses
len(SEQUENCE) incorrectly. Instead one could use if SEQUENCE or if not SEQUENCE.
For instance, all of the examples below:

if len(S):
pass

if not len(S):
pass

if len(S) > 0:
pass

if len(S) != 0:
pass

if len(S) == 0:
pass

can be written in a more natural way:

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if S:
pass

if not S:
pass

See https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#programming-recommendations for more information.

• A new extension was added, emptystring.py which detects whenever we detect comparisons to empty
string constants. This extension is disabled by default. For instance, the examples below:

if S != "":
pass

if S == '':
pass

can be written in a more natural way:

if S:
pass

if not S:
pass

An exception to this is when empty string is an allowed value whose meaning is treated differently than None.
For example the meaning could be user selected no additional options vs. user has not made their selection yet!
You can activate this checker by adding the line:

load-plugins=pylint.extensions.emptystring

to the MASTER section of your .pylintrc or using the command:

$ pylint a.py --load-plugins=pylint.extensions.emptystring

• A new extension was added, comparetozero.py which detects whenever we compare integers to zero. This
extension is disabled by default. For instance, the examples below:

if X != 0:
pass

if X == 0:
pass

can be written in a more natural way:

if X:
pass

if not X:
pass

An exception to this is when zero is an allowed value whose meaning is treated differently than None. For
example the meaning could be None means no limit, while 0 means the limit it zero!
You can activate this checker by adding the line:

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load-plugins=pylint.extensions.comparetozero

to the MASTER section of your .pylintrc or using the command:

$ pylint a.py --load-plugins=pylint.extensions.comparetozero

• We’ve added new error conditions for bad-super-call which now detect the usage of
super(type(self), self) and super(self.__class__, self) patterns. These can lead
to recursion loop in derived classes. The problem is visible only if you override a class that uses these incorrect
invocations of super().
For instance, Derived.__init__() will correctly call Base.__init__. At this point type(self)
will be equal to Derived and the call again goes to Base.__init__ and we enter a recursion loop.

class Base(object):
def __init__(self, param1, param2):
super(type(self), self).__init__(param1, param2)

class Derived(Base):
def __init__(self, param1, param2):
super(Derived, self).__init__(param1, param2)

• The warnings missing-returns-doc and missing-yields-doc have each been replaced with
two new warnings - missing-[return|yield]-doc and missing-[return|yield]-type-doc.
Having these as separate warnings allows the user to choose whether their documentation style requires text
descriptions of function return/yield, specification of return/yield types, or both.

# This will raise missing-return-type-doc but not missing-return-doc

def my_sphinx_style_func(self):
"""This is a Sphinx-style docstring.

:returns: Always False

"""
return False

# This will raise missing-return-doc but not missing-return-type-doc

def my_google_style_func(self):
"""This is a Google-style docstring.

Returns:
bool:
"""
return False

• A new refactoring check was added, redefined-argument-from-local, which is emitted when pylint
can detect than a function argument is redefined locally in some potential error prone cases. For instance, in
the following piece of code, we have a bug, since the check will never return True, given the fact that we are
comparing the same object to its attributes.

def test(resource):
for resource in resources:
# The ``for`` is reusing ``resource``, which means that the following
# ``resource`` is not what we wanted to check against.
if resource.resource_type == resource:
call_resource(resource)

Other places where this check looks are with statement name bindings and except handler’s name binding.

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• A new refactoring check was added, no-else-return, which is emitted when pylint encounters an else
following a chain of ifs, all of them containing a return statement.

def foo1(x, y, z):

if x:
return y
else: # This is unnecessary here.
return z

We could fix it deleting the else statement.

def foo1(x, y, z):

if x:
return y
return z

• A new Python 3 check was added, eq-without-hash, which enforces classes that implement __eq__ also
implement __hash__. The behavior around classes which implement __eq__ but not __hash__ changed in
Python 3; in Python 2 such classes would get object.__hash__ as their default implementation. In Python
3, aforementioned classes get None as their implementation thus making them unhashable.

class JustEq(object):
def __init__(self, x):
self.x = x

def __eq__(self, other):

return self.x == other.x

class Neither(object):
def __init__(self, x):
self.x = x

class HashAndEq(object):
def __init__(self, x):
self.x = x

def __eq__(self, other):

return self.x == other.x

def __hash__(self):
return hash(self.x)

{Neither(1), Neither(2)} # OK in Python 2 and Python 3

{HashAndEq(1), HashAndEq(2)} # OK in Python 2 and Python 3
{JustEq(1), JustEq(2)} # Works in Python 2, throws in Python 3

In general, this is a poor practice which motivated the behavior change.

as_set = {JustEq(1), JustEq(2)}

print(JustEq(1) in as_set) # prints False
print(JustEq(1) in list(as_set)) # prints True

In order to fix this error and avoid behavior differences between Python 2 and Python 3, classes should either
explicitly set __hash__ to None or implement a hashing function.

class JustEq(object):
def __init__(self, x):
(continues on next page)

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(continued from previous page)

self.x = x

def __eq__(self, other):

return self.x == other.x

__hash__ = None

{JustEq(1), JustEq(2)} # Now throws an exception in both Python 2 and Python 3.

• 3 new Python 3 checkers were added, div-method, idiv-method and rdiv-method. The magic meth-
ods __div__ and __idiv__ have been phased out in Python 3 in favor of __truediv__. Classes imple-
menting __div__ that still need to be used from Python 2 code not using from __future__ import
division should implement __truediv__ and alias __div__ to that implementation.

from __future__ import division

class DivisibleThing(object):
def __init__(self, x):
self.x = x

def __truediv__(self, other):

return DivisibleThing(self.x / other.x)

__div__ = __truediv__

• A new Python 3 checker was added to warn about accessing the message attribute on Exceptions. The message
attribute was deprecated in Python 2.7 and was removed in Python 3. See https://www.python.org/dev/peps/
pep-0352/#retracted-ideas for more information.

try:
raise Exception("Oh No!!")
except Exception as e:
print(e.message)

Instead of relying on the message attribute, you should explicitly cast the exception to a string:

try:
raise Exception("Oh No!!")
except Exception as e:
print(str(e))

• A new Python 3 checker was added to warn about using encode or decode on strings with non-text codecs.
This check also checks calls to open with the keyword argument encoding. See https://docs.python.org/3/
whatsnew/3.4.html#improvements-to-codec-handling for more information.

'hello world'.encode('hex')

Instead of using the encode method for non-text codecs use the codecs module.

import codecs
codecs.encode('hello world', 'hex')

• A new warning was added, overlapping-except, which is emitted when an except handler treats two
exceptions which are overlapping. This means that one exception is an ancestor of the other one or it is just an
alias.

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For example, in Python 3.3+, IOError is an alias for OSError. In addition, socket.error is an alias for OSError.
The intention is to find cases like the following:

import socket
try:
pass
except (ConnectionError, IOError, OSError, socket.error):
pass

• A new Python 3 checker was added to warn about accessing sys.maxint. This attribute was removed in
Python 3 in favor of sys.maxsize.

import sys
print(sys.maxint)

Instead of using sys.maxint, use sys.maxsize

import sys
print(sys.maxsize)

• A new Python 3 checker was added to warn about importing modules that have either moved or been removed
from the standard library.
One of the major undertakings with Python 3 was a reorganization of the standard library to remove old or
supplanted modules and reorganize some of the existing modules. As a result, roughly 100 modules that exist in
Python 2 no longer exist in Python 3. See https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3108/ and https://www.python.
org/dev/peps/pep-0004/ for more information. For suggestions on how to handle this, see https://pythonhosted.
org/six/#module-six.moves or http://python3porting.com/stdlib.html.

from cStringIO import StringIO

Instead of directly importing the deprecated module, either use six.moves or a conditional import.

from six.moves import cStringIO as StringIO

if sys.version_info[0] >= 3:
from io import StringIO
else:
from cStringIO import StringIO

This checker will assume any imports that happen within a conditional or a try/except block are valid.
• A new Python 3 checker was added to warn about accessing deprecated functions on the string module. Python 3
removed functions that were duplicated from the builtin str class. See https://docs.python.org/2/library/string.
html#deprecated-string-functions for more information.

import string
print(string.upper('hello world!'))

Instead of using string.upper, call the upper method directly on the string object.

"hello world!".upper()

• A new Python 3 checker was added to warn about calling str.translate with the removed deletechars
parameter. str.translate is frequently used as a way to remove characters from a string.

'hello world'.translate(None, 'low')

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Unfortunately, there is not an idiomatic way of writing this call in a 2and3 compatible way. If this code is not in
the critical path for your application and the use of translate was a premature optimization, consider using
re.sub instead:

import re
chars_to_remove = re.compile('[low]')
chars_to_remove.sub('', 'hello world')

If this code is in your critical path and must be as fast as possible, consider declaring a helper method that varies
based upon Python version.

if six.PY3:
def _remove_characters(text, deletechars):
return text.translate({ord(x): None for x in deletechars})
else:
def _remove_characters(text, deletechars):
return text.translate(None, deletechars)

• A new refactoring check was added, consider-using-ternary, which is emitted when pylint encounters
constructs which were used to emulate ternary statement before it was introduced in Python 2.5.

value = condition and truth_value or false_value

Warning can be fixed by using standard ternary construct:

value = truth_value if condition else false_value

• A new refactoring check was added, trailing-comma-tuple, which is emitted when pylint finds an one-
element tuple, created by a stray comma. This can suggest a potential problem in the code and it is recommended
to use parantheses in order to emphasise the creation of a tuple, rather than relying on the comma itself.
The warning is emitted for such a construct:

a = 1,

The warning can be fixed by adding parantheses:

a = (1, )

• Two new check were added for detecting an unsupported operation over an instance,
unsupported-assignment-operation and unsupported-delete-operation. The first
one is emitted whenever an object does not support item assignment, while the second is emitted when an
object does not support item deletion:

class A:
pass
instance = A()
instance[4] = 4 # unsupported-assignment-operation
del instance[4] # unsupported-delete-operation

• A new check was added, relative-beyond-top-level, which is emitted when a relative import tries to
access too many levels in the current package.
• A new check was added, trailing-newlines, which is emitted when a file has trailing new lines.
• invalid-length-returned check was added, which is emitted when a __len__ implementation does
not return a non-negative integer.

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• There is a new extension, pylint.extensions.mccabe, which can be used for computing the McCabe
complexity of classes and functions.
You can enable this extension through --load-plugins=pylint.extensions.mccabe
• A new check was added, used-prior-global-declaration. This is emitted when a name is used prior
a global declaration, resulting in a SyntaxError in Python 3.6.
• A new message was added, assign-to-new-keyword. This is emitted when used name is known to
become a keyword in future Python release. Assignments to keywords would result in SyntaxError after
switching to newer interpreter version.

# While it's correct in Python 2.x, it raises a SyntaxError in Python 3.x

True = 1
False = 0

# Same as above, but it'll be a SyntaxError starting from Python 3.7

async = "async"
await = "await

10.8.3 Other Changes

• We don’t emit by default no-member if we have opaque inference objects in the inference results
This is controlled through the new flag --ignore-on-opaque-inference, which is by default True. The
inference can return multiple potential results while evaluating a Python object, but some branches might not be
evaluated, which results in partial inference. In that case, it might be useful to still emit no-member and other
checks for the rest of the inferred objects.
• Namespace packages are now supported by pylint. This includes both explicit namespace packages and implicit
namespace packages, supported in Python 3 through PEP 420.
• A new option was added, --analyse-fallback-block.
This can be used to support both Python 2 and 3 compatible import block code, which means that the import
block might have code that exists only in one or another interpreter, leading to false positives when analysed.
By default, this is false, you can enable the analysis for both branches using this flag.
• ignored-argument-names option is now used for ignoring arguments for unused-variable check.
This option was used for ignoring arguments when computing the correct number of arguments a function
should have, but for handling the arguments with regard to unused-variable check, dummy-variables-rgx was
used instead. Now, ignored-argument-names is used for its original purpose and also for ignoring the matched
arguments for the unused-variable check. This offers a better control of what should be ignored and how. Also,
the same option was moved from the design checker to the variables checker, which means that the option now
appears under the [VARIABLES] section inside the configuration file.
• A new option was added, redefining-builtins-modules, for controlling the modules which can rede-
fine builtins, such as six.moves and future.builtins.
• A new option was added, ignore-patterns, which is used for building a blacklist of directories and files
matching the regex patterns, similar to the ignore option.
• The reports are now disabled by default, as well as the information category warnings.
• arguments-differ check was rewritten to take in consideration keyword only parameters and variadics.
Now it also complains about losing or adding capabilities to a method, by introducing positional or keyword
variadics. For instance, pylint now complains about these cases:

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class Parent(object):

def foo(self, first, second):

...

def bar(self, **kwargs):

...

def baz(self, *, first):

...

class Child(Parent):

# Why subclassing in the first place?

def foo(self, *args, **kwargs):
# mutate args or kwargs.
super(Child, self).foo(*args, **kwargs)

def bar(self, first=None, second=None, **kwargs):

# The overridden method adds two new parameters,
# which can also be passed as positional arguments,
# breaking the contract of the parent's method.

def baz(self, first):

# Not keyword-only

• redefined-outer-name is now also emitted when a nested loop’s target variable is the same as an outer
loop.

for i, j in [(1, 2), (3, 4)]:

for j in range(i):
print(j)

• relax character limit for method and function names that starts with _. This will let people to use longer
descriptive names for methods and functions with a shorter scope (considered as private). The same idea applies
to variable names, only with an inverse rule: you want long descriptive names for variables with bigger scope,
like globals.
• Add InvalidMessageError exception class and replace assert in pylint.utils with raise
InvalidMessageError.
• UnknownMessageError (formerly UnknownMessage) and EmptyReportError (formerly
EmptyReport) are now provided by the new pylint.exceptions submodule instead of pylint.
utils as before.
• We now support inline comments for comma separated values in the configurations
For instance, you can now use the # sign for having comments inside comma separated values, as seen below:

disable=no-member, # Don't care about it for now

bad-indentation, # No need for this
import-error

Of course, interweaving comments with values is also working:

disable=no-member,
# Don't care about it for now
bad-indentation # No need for this

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This works by setting the inline comment prefixes accordingly.

• Added epytext docstring support to the docparams extension.
• We added support for providing hints when not finding a missing member.
For example, given the following code, it should be obvious that the programmer intended to use the mail
attribute, rather than email.

class Contribution:
def __init__(self, name, email, date):
self.name = name
self.mail = mail
self.date = date

for c in contributions:
print(c.email) # Oups

pylint will now warn that there is a chance of having a typo, suggesting new names that could be used instead.

$ pylint a.py
E: 8,10: Instance of 'Contribution' has no 'email' member; maybe 'mail'?

The behaviour is controlled through the --missing-member-hint option. Other options that come with
this change are --missing-member-max-choices for choosing the total number of choices that should
be picked in this situation and --missing-member-hint-distance, which specifies a metric for com-
puting the distance between the names (this is based on Levenshtein distance, which means the lower the number,
the more pickier the algorithm will be).
• PyLinter.should_analyze_file has a new parameter, is_argument, which specifies if the given
path is a pylint argument or not.
should_analyze_file is called whenever pylint tries to determine if a file should be analyzed, de-
faulting to files with the .py extension, but this function gets called only in the case where the said file
is not passed as a command line argument to pylint. This usually means that pylint will analyze a file,
even if that file has a different extension, as long as the file was explicitly passed at command line. Since
should_analyze_file cannot be overridden to handle all the cases, the check for the provenience of files
was moved into should_analyze_file. This means we now can write something similar with this exam-
ple, for ignoring every file respecting the desired property, disregarding the provenience of the file, being it a
file passed as CLI argument or part of a package.

from pylint.lint import Run, PyLinter

class CustomPyLinter(PyLinter):

def should_analyze_file(self, modname, path, is_argument=False):

if respect_condition(path):
return False
return super().should_analyze_file(modname, path, is_argument=is_
˓→argument)

class CustomRun(Run):
LinterClass = CustomPyLinter

CustomRun(sys.argv[1:])

• Imports aliased with underscore are skipped when checking for unused imports.

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• bad-builtin and redefined-variable-type are now extensions, being disabled by default. They
can be enabled through: --load-plugins=pylint.extensions.redefined_variable_type,
pylint.extensions.bad_builtin
– Imports checker supports new switch allow-wildcard-with-all which disables warning on wild-
card import when imported module defines __all__ variable.
• differing-param-doc is now used for the differing part of the old missing-param-doc, and
differing-type-doc for the differing part of the old missing-type-doc.

10.8.4 Bug fixes

• Fix a false positive of redundant-returns-doc, occurred when the documented function was using yield
instead of return.
• Fix a false positive of missing-param-doc and missing-type-doc, occurred when a class docstring
uses the For the parameters, see magic string but the class __init__ docstring does not, or vice
versa.
• Added proper exception type inference for missing-raises-doc. Now:

def my_func():
""""My function."""
ex = ValueError('foo')
raise ex

will properly be flagged for missing documentation of :raises ValueError: instead of :raises ex:,
among other scenarios.
• Fix false positives of missing-[raises|params|type]-doc due to not recognizing valid keyword syn-
onyms supported by Sphinx.
• More thorough validation in MessagesStore.register_messages() to detect conflicts between a new
message and any existing message id, symbol, or old_names.
• We now support having plugins that shares the same name and with each one providing options.
A plugin can be logically split into multiple classes, each class providing certain capabilities, all of them being
tied under the same name. But when two or more such classes are also adding options, then pylint crashed,
since it already added the first encountered section. Now, these should work as expected.

from pylint.checkers import BaseChecker

class DummyPlugin1(BaseChecker):
name = 'dummy_plugin'
msgs = {'I9061': ('Dummy short desc 01', 'dummy-message-01', 'Dummy long desc
˓→')}

options = (
('dummy_option_1', {
'type': 'string',
'metavar': '<string>',
'help': 'Dummy option 1',
}),
)

class DummyPlugin2(BaseChecker):
(continues on next page)

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(continued from previous page)

name = 'dummy_plugin'
msgs = {'I9060': ('Dummy short desc 02', 'dummy-message-02', 'Dummy long desc
˓→')}

options = (
('dummy_option_2', {
'type': 'string',
'metavar': '<string>',
'help': 'Dummy option 2',
}),
)

def register(linter):
linter.register_checker(DummyPlugin1(linter))
linter.register_checker(DummyPlugin2(linter))

• We do not yield unused-argument for singledispatch implementations and do not warn about
function-redefined for multiple implementations with same name.

from functools import singledispatch

@singledispatch
def f(x):
return 2*x

@f.register(str)
def _(x):
return -1

@f.register(int)
@f.register(float)
def _(x):
return -x

• unused-variable checker has new functionality of warning about unused variables in global module
namespace. Since globals in module namespace may be a part of exposed API, this check is disabled by default.
For enabling it, set allow-global-unused-variables option to false.
• Fix a false-positive logging-format-interpolation message, when format specifications are used in
formatted string. In general, these operations are not always convertible to old-style formatting used by logging
module.
• Added a new switch single-line-class-stmt to allow single-line declaration of empty class bodies
(as seen in the example below). Pylint won’t emit a multiple-statements message when this option is
enabled.

class MyError(Exception): pass

– too-many-format-args and too-few-format-args are emitted correctly (or not emitted at all, when exact
count of elements in RHS cannot be inferred) when starred expressions are used in RHS tuple. For ex-
ample, code block as shown below detects correctly that the used tuple has in fact three elements, not
two.

meat = ['spam', 'ham']

print('%s%s%s' % ('eggs', *meat))

• cyclic-import checker supports local disable clauses. When one of cycle imports was done in scope where

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disable clause was active, cycle is not reported as violation.

10.8.5 Removed Changes

• pylint-gui was removed, because it was deemed unfit for being included in pylint. It had a couple of bugs
and misfeatures, its usability was subpar and since its development was neglected, we decided it is best to move
on without it.
• The HTML reporter was removed, including the --output-format=html option. It was lately a second
class citizen in Pylint, being mostly neglected. Since we now have the JSON reporter, it can be used as a basis
for building more prettier HTML reports than what Pylint can currently generate. This is part of the effort of
removing cruft from Pylint, by removing less used features.
• The --files-output option was removed. While the same functionality cannot be easily replicated, the
JSON reporter, for instance, can be used as a basis for generating the messages per each file.
• --required-attributes option was removed.
• --ignore-iface-methods option was removed.
• The --optimize-ast flag was removed.
The option was initially added for handling pathological cases, such as joining too many strings using the
addition operator, which was leading pylint to have a recursion error when trying to figure out what the string
was. Unfortunately, we decided to ignore the issue, since the pathological case would have happen when the
code was parsed by Python as well, without actually reaching the runtime step and as such, we decided to
remove the error altogether.
• epylint.py_run’s script parameter was removed.
Now epylint.py_run is always using the underlying epylint.lint method from the current interpreter.
This avoids some issues when multiple instances of pylint are installed, which means that epylint.py_run
might have ran a different epylint script than what was intended.

10.9 What’s New In Pylint 1.6

Release 1.6.0
Date 2016-07-07

10.9.1 Summary – Release highlights

Nothing major.

10.9.2 New checkers

• We added a new recommendation check, consider-iterating-dictionary, which is emitted when a

dictionary is iterated by using .keys().
For instance, the following code would trigger this warning, since the dictionary’s keys can be iterated without
calling the method explicitly.

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for key in dictionary.keys():

...

# Can be refactored to:

for key in dictionary:
...

• trailing-newlines check was added, which is emitted when a file has trailing newlines.
• invalid-length-returned check was added, which is emitted when the __len__ special method re-
turns something else than a non-negative number. For instance, this example is triggering it:

class Container(object):
def __len__(self):
return self._items # Oups, forgot to call len() over it.

• Add a new check to the check_docs extension for looking for duplicate constructor parameters in a class con-
structor docstring or in a class docstring.
The check multiple-constructor-doc is emitted when the parameter is documented in both places.
• We added a new extension plugin, pylint.extensions.mccabe, which can be used for warning about
the complexity in the code.
You can enable it as in:

$ pylint module_or_project --load-plugins=pylint.extensions.mccabe

See more at Design checker

10.9.3 New features

• generated-members now supports qualified names through regular expressions.

For instance, for ignoring all the errors generated by numpy.core’s attributes, we can now use:

$ pylint a.py --generated-members=numpy.*

• Add the ability to ignore files based on regex matching, with the new --ignore-patterns option.
Rather than clobber the existing ignore option, we decided to have a separate option for it. For instance, for
ignoring all the test files, we can now use:

$ pylint myproject --ignore-patterns=test.*?py

• We added a new option, redefining-builtins-modules, which is used for defining the modules which
can redefine builtins. pylint will emit an error when a builtin is redefined, such as defining a variable called
next. But in some cases, the builtins can be redefined in the case they are imported from other places, different
than the builtins module, such is the case for six.moves, which contains more forward-looking functions:

$ cat a.py
# Oups, now pylint emits a redefined-builtin message.
from six.moves import open
$ pylint a.py --redefining-builtins-modules=six.moves

Default values: six.moves,future.builtins

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10.9.4 Bug fixes

• Fixed a bug where the top name of a qualified import was detected as an unused variable.
• We don’t warn about invalid-sequence-index if the indexed object has unknown base classes, that
Pylint cannot deduce.

10.9.5 Other Changes

• The bad-builtin check was moved into an extension.

The check was complaining about used builtin functions which were supposed to not be used. For instance, map
and filter were falling into this category, since better alternatives can be used, such as list comprehensions.
But the check was annoying, since using map or filter can have its use cases and as such, we decided
to move it to an extension check instead. It can now be enabled through --load-plugins=pylint.
extensions.bad_builtin.
• We use the configparser backport internally, for Python 2.
This allows having comments inside list values, in the configuration, such as:

disable=no-member,
# Don't like this check
bad-indentation

• We now use the isort package internally.

This improves the `wrong-import-order check, so now we should have less false positives regarding the
import order.
• We do not emit import-error or no-name-in-module for fallback import blocks by default.
A fallback import block can be considered a TryExcept block, which contains imports in both branches, such
as:

try:
import urllib.request as request
except ImportError:
import urllib2 as request

In the case where pylint can not find one import from the except branch, then it will emit an
import-error, but this gets cumbersome when trying to write compatible code for both Python ver-
sions. As such, we don’t check these blocks by default, but the analysis can be enforced by using the new
--analyse-fallback-block flag.
• reimported is emitted when the same name is imported from different module, as in:

from collections import deque, OrderedDict, deque

10.9.6 Deprecated features

• The HTML support was deprecated and will be eventually removed in Pylint 1.7.0.
This feature was lately a second class citizen in Pylint, being often neglected and having a couple of bugs. Since
we now have the JSON reporter, this can be used as a basis for more prettier HTML outputs than what Pylint
can currently offer.
• The --files-output option was deprecated and will be eventually removed in Pylint 1.7.0.

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• The --optimize-ast option was deprecated and will be eventually removed in Pylint 1.7.0.
The option was initially added for handling pathological cases, such as joining too many strings using the
addition operator, which was leading pylint to have a recursion error when trying to figure out what the string
was. Unfortunately, we decided to ignore the issue, since the pathological case would have happen when the
code was parsed by Python as well, without actually reaching the runtime step and as such, we will remove the
option in the future.
• The check_docs extension is now deprecated. The extension is still available under the docparams name,
so this should work:

$ pylint module_or_package --load-extensions=pylint.extensions.docparams

The old name is still kept for backward compatibility, but it will be eventually removed.

10.9.7 Removed features

• None yet
The "Changelog" contains all nontrivial changes to Pylint for the current version.

10.10 Pylint’s ChangeLog

10.10.1 What’s New in Pylint 2.4.5?

Release data: TBA

• Fixed an AttributeError caused by improper handling of dataclasses inference in pyreverse
Close #3256

10.10.2 What’s New in Pylint 2.4.4?

Release date: 2019-11-13

• Exempt all the names found in type annotations from unused-import
The previous code was assuming that only typing names need to be exempted, but we need to do that for the
rest of the type comment names as well.
Close #3112
• Relax type import detection for names that do not come from the typing module
Close #3191

10.10.3 What’s New in Pylint 2.4.3?

Release date: 2019-10-18

• Fix an issue with unnecessary-comprehension in comprehensions with additional repacking of ele-
ments.
Close #3148

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• import-outside-toplevel is emitted for ImportFrom nodes as well.

Close #3175
• Do not emit no-method-argument for functions using positional only args.
Close #3161
• consider-using-sys-exit is no longer emitted when exit is imported in the local scope.
Close #3147
• invalid-overridden-method takes abc.abstractproperty in account
Close #3150
• Fixed missing-yield-type-doc getting incorrectly raised when a generator does not document a yield
type but has a type annotation.
Closes #3185
• typing.overload functions are exempted from too-many-function-args
Close #3170

10.10.4 What’s New in Pylint 2.4.2?

Release date: 2019-09-30

• ignored-modules can skip submodules. Close #3135
• self-assigning-variable skips class level assignments.
Close #2930
• consider-using-sys-exit is exempted when exit() is imported from sys
Close #3145
• Exempt annotated assignments without variable from class-variable-slots-conflict
Close #3141
• Fix utils.is_error to account for functions returning early.
This fixes a false negative with unused-variable which was no longer triggered when a function raised an
exception as the last instruction, but the body of the function still had unused variables.
Close #3028

10.10.5 What’s New in Pylint 2.4.1?

Release date: 2019-09-25

• Exempt type checking definitions defined in both clauses of a type checking guard
Close #3127
• Exempt type checking definitions inside the type check guard
In a7f236528bb3758886b97285a56f3f9ce5b13a99 we added basic support for emitting used-before-assignment
if a variable was only defined inside a type checking guard (using TYPE_CHECKING variable from typing)
Unfortunately that missed the case of using those type checking imports inside the guard itself, which triggered
spurious used-before-assignment errors.

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Close #3119
• Require astroid >= 2.3 to avoid any compatibility issues.

10.10.6 What’s New in Pylint 2.4.0?

Release date: 2019-09-24

• New check: import-outside-toplevel
This check warns when modules are imported from places other than a module toplevel, e.g. inside a function
or a class.
• Handle inference ambiguity for invalid-format-index
Close #2752
• Removed Python 2 specific checks such as relative-import, invalid-encoded-data,
missing-super-argument.
• Support forward references for function-redefined check.
Close #2540
• Handle redefinitions in case of type checking imports.
Close #2834
• Added a new check, consider-using-sys-exit
This check is emitted when we detect that a quit() or exit() is invoked instead of sys.exit(), which is the preferred
way of exiting in program.
Close #2925
• useless-suppression check now ignores cyclic-import suppressions, which could lead to false
postiives due to incomplete context at the time of the check.
Close #3064
• Added new checks, no-else-break and no-else-continue
These checks highlight unnecessary else and elif blocks after break and continue statements.
Close #2327
• Don’t emit protected-access when a single underscore prefixed attribute is used inside a special method
Close #1802
• Fix the "statement" values in the PyLinter’s stats reports by module.
• Added a new check, invalid-overridden-method
This check is emitted when we detect that a method is overridden as a property or a property is overridden as a
method. This can indicate a bug in the application code that will trigger a runtime error.
Close #2670
• Added a new check, arguments-out-of-order
This check warns if you have arguments with names that match those in a function’s signature but you are
passing them in to the function in a different order.
Close #2975

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• Added a new check, redeclared-assigned-name

This check is emitted when pylint detects that a name was assigned one or multiple times in the same assign-
ment, which indicate a potential bug. Close #2898
• Ignore lambda calls with variadic arguments without a context.
Inferring variadic positional arguments and keyword arguments will result into empty Tuples and Dicts, which
can lead in some cases to false positives with regard to no-value-for-parameter. In order to avoid this, until we’ll
have support for call context propagation, we’re ignoring such cases if detected. We already did that for function
calls, but the previous fix was not taking in consideration lambdas
Close #2918
• Added a new check, self-assigning-variable
This check is emitted when we detect that a variable is assigned to itself, which might indicate a potential bug
in the code application. Close #2930
• Added a new check, property-with-parameters.
This check is emitted when we detect that a defined property also has parameters, which are useless. Close
#3006
• Excluded protocol classes from a couple of checks. Close #3002.
• Add a check unnecessary-comprehension that detects unnecessary comprehensions.
This check is emitted when pylint finds list-, set- or dict-comprehensions, that are unnecessary and can be
rewritten with the list-, set- or dict-constructors.
Close #2905
• Excluded PEP 526 instance and class variables from no-member. Close #2945
• Excluded attrs from too-few-public-methods check. Close #2988.
• unused-import emitted for the right import names in function scopes.
Close #2928
• Dropped support for Python 3.4.
• assignment-from-no-return not triggered for async methods.
Close #2902
• Don’t emit attribute-defined-outside-init for variables defined in setters.
Close #409
• Syntax errors report the column number.
Close #2914
• Support fully qualified typing imports for type annotations.
Close #2915
• Exclude __dict__ from attribute-defined-outside-init
• Fix pointer on spelling check when the error are more than one time in the same line.
Close #2895
• Fix crash happening when parent of called object cannot be determined
• Allow of in GoogleDocstring.re_multiple_type

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• Added subprocess-run-check to handle subrocess.run without explicitly set check keyword.

Close #2848
• When we can’t infer bare except handlers, skip try-except-raise
Close #2853
• Handle more unnecessary-lambda cases when dealing with additional kwargs in wrapped calls
Close #2845
• Better postponed evaluation of annotations handling
Close #2847
• Support postponed evaluation of annotations for variable annotations.
Close #2838
• epylint.py_run defaults to python in case the current executable is not a Python one.
Close #2837
• Ignore raw docstrings when running Similarities checker with ignore-docstrings=yes option
• Fix crash when calling inherit_from_std_ex on a class which is its own ancestor
Close #2680
• Added a new check that warns the user if a function call is used inside a test but parentheses are missing.
Close #2658
• len-as-condition now only fires when a len(x) call is made without an explicit comparison
The message and description accompanying this checker has been changed reflect this new behavior, by explic-
itly asking to either rely on the fact that empty sequence are false or to compare the length with a scalar.
Close #2684
• Add preferred-module checker that notify if an import has a replacement module that should be used.
This check is emitted when pylint finds an imported module that has a preferred replacement listed in
preferred-modules.
• assigning-non-slot not emitted for classes with unknown base classes.
Close #2807
• old-division is not emitted for non-Const nodes.
Close #2808
• Added method arguments to the dot writer for pyreverse.
Close #2139
• Support for linting file from stdin.
IDEs may benefit from the support for linting from an in-memory file.
Close #1187
• Added a new check class-variable-slots-conflict
This check is emitted when pylint finds a class variable that conflicts with a slot name, which would raise a
ValueError at runtime.

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• Added new check: dict-iter-missing-items (E1141)

Close #2761
• Fix issue with pylint name in output of python -m pylint –version
Close #2764
• Relicense logo material under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
• Skip if expressions from f-strings for the check_elif checker
Close #2816
• C0412 (ungrouped-import) is now compatible with isort.
Close #2806
• Added new extension to detect too much code in a try clause
Close #2877
• signature-mutators option was added
With this option, users can choose to ignore too-many-function-args, unexpected-keyword-arg, and
no-value-for-parameter for functions decorated with decorators that change the signature of a deco-
rated function.
Close #259
• Fixed a pragma comment on its own physical line being ignored when part of a logical line with the previous
physical line.
Close #199
• Fixed false undefined-loop-variable for a function defined in the loop, that uses the variable defined in that loop.
Close #202
• Fixed unused-argument and function-redefined getting raised for functions decorated with typing.overload.
Close #1581
• Fixed a false positive with consider-using-dict-comprehension for constructions that can’t be con-
verted to a comprehension
Close #2963
• Added __post_init__ to defining-attr-methods in order to avoid
attribute-defined-outside-init in dataclasses.
Close #2581
• Changed description of W0199 to use the term 2-item-tuple instead of 2-uple.
• Allow a . as a prefix for Sphinx name resolution.
• Checkers must now keep a 1 to 1 relationship between "msgid" (ie: C1234) and "symbol" (ie : human-readable-
symbol)
• In checkers, an old_names can now be used for multiple new messages and pylint is now a little faster
Caused by #1164. It means if you do a partial old_names for a message definition an exception will tell you that you
must rename the associated identification.
• Allow the choice of f-strings as a valid way of formatting logging strings.
Closes #2395

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• Added --list-msgs-enabled command to list all enabled and disabled messages given the current RC
file and command line arguments.

10.10.7 What’s New in Pylint 2.3.0?

Release date: 2019-02-27

• Protect against NonDeducibleTypeHierarchy when calling semi-private is_subtype
astroid.helpers.is_subtype raises NonDeducibleTypeHierarchy when it cannot infer the base classes of the given
types, but that makes sense in its context given that the method is mostly used to inform the inference process
about the hierarchy of classes. Doesn’t make that much sense for pylint itself, which is why we’re handling
the exception here, rather than in astroid
Close PyCQA/astroid#644
• Added a new command line option list-groups for listing all the check groups pylint knows about.
• Allow BaseException for emitting broad-except, just like Exception.
Close #2741
• Fixed a crash that occurred for bad-str-strip-call when strip() received None
Close #2743
• Don’t emit *-not-iterating checks for builtins consumed by itertools
Close #2731
• Fix a crash caused by iterating over Uninferable in a string formatting check.
Close #2727
• Fixed false positives for no-self-argument and unsubscriptable-object when using
__class_getitem__ (new in Python 3.7)
Close #2416
• Support Ellipsis as a synonym for pass statements.
Close #2718
• fixme gets triggered only on comments.
Close #2321
• Fixed a false positive for unused-variable and nonlocal assignments
Close #2671
• Added load_configuration() hook for plugins
New optional hook for plugins is added: load_configuration(). This hook is executed after configura-
tion is loaded to prevent overwriting plugin specific configuration via user-based configuration.
Close #2635
• Fix missing-raises-doc false positive (W9006)
Close #1502
• Exempt starred unpacking from *-not-iterating Python 3 checks
Close #2651

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• Make compare-to-zero less zealous by checking against equality and identity

Close #2645
• Add no-else-raise warning (R1720)
Close #2558
• Exempt yield from from *-not-iterating Python 3 checks.
Close #2643
• Fix incorrect generation of no-else-return warnings (R1705)
Fixed issue where if statements with nested if statements were incorrectly being flagged as
no-else-return in some cases and not being flagged as no-else-return in other cases. Added tests
for verification and updated pylint source files to eliminate newly exposed warnings.
• Fix false positive with not-async-context-manager caused by not understanding contextlib.asynccontextmanager
Close #2440
• Refactor bad-reversed-sequence to account for more objects that can define __reversed__
One such object would be an enum class, for which __reversed__ yields each individual enum. As such,
the check for bad-reversed-sequence needs to not differentiate between classes and instances when it
comes for checking of __reversed__ presence.
Close #2598
• Added wrong-exception-operation
Used when an operation is done against an exception, but the operation is not valid for the exception in question.
Usually emitted when having binary operations between exceptions in except handlers.
Close #2494
• no-member is emitted for enums when they lack a member
Previously we weren’t doing this because we detected a __getattr__ implementation on the Enum class
(and this check is skipped for classes with __getattr__), but that is fine for Enums, given that they are
inferred in a customised way in astroid.
Close #2565
• Generalize chained-comparison
Previous version incorrectly detects a < b < c and b < d and fails to detect a < b < c and c < d.
• Avoid popping __main__ when using multiple jobs
Close #2689
• Add a new option ’check-str-concat-over-line-jumps’ to check ’implicit-str-concat-in-sequence’
• Fixes for the new style logging format linter.
The number of arguments was not handled properly, leading to an always successful check.
• Fix false positive not-callable for uninferable properties.
• Fix false positive useless-else-on-loop if the break is deep in the else of an inner loop.
• Minor improvements to the help text for a few options.

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10.10.8 What’s New in Pylint 2.2.2?

Release date: 2018-11-28

• Change the logging-format-style to use name identifier instead of their corresponding Python identi-
fiers
This is to prevent users having to think about escaping the default value for logging-format-style in
the generated config file. Also our config parsing utilities don’t quite support escaped values when it comes to
choices detection, so this would have needed various hacks around that.
Closes #2614

10.10.9 What’s New in Pylint 2.2.1?

Release date: 2018-11-27

• Fix a crash caused by implicit-str-concat-in-sequence and multi-bytes characters.
Closes #2610

10.10.10 What’s New in Pylint 2.2?

Release date: 2018-11-25

• Consider range() objects for undefined-loop-variable leaking from iteration.
Close #2533
• deprecated-method can use the attribute name for identifying a deprecated method
Previously we were using the fully qualified name, which we still do, but the fully qualified name for some
unittest deprecated aliases leads to a generic deprecation function. Instead on relying on that, we now also
rely on the attribute name, which should solve some false positives.
Close #1653 Close #1946
• Fix compatibility with changes to stdlib tokenizer.
• pylint is less eager to consume the whole line for pragmas
Close #2485
• Obtain the correct number of CPUs for virtualized or containerized environments.
Close #2519
• Change unbalanced-tuple-unpacking back to a warning.
It used to be a warning until a couple of years ago, after it was promoted to an error. But the check might be
suggesting the wrong thing in some cases, for instance when checking against sys.argv which cannot be
known at static analysis time. Given it might rely on potential unknown data, it’s best to have it as a warning.
Close #2522
• Remove enumerate usage suggestion when defining __iter__ (C0200)
Close #2477
• Emit too-many-starred-assignment only when the number of Starred nodes is per assignment ele-
ments
Close #2513

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• try-except-raise checker now handles multilevel inheritance hirerachy for exceptions correctly.
Close #2484
• Add a new check, simplifiable-if-expression for expressions like True if cond else
False.
Close #2487
• too-few-public-methods is not reported for typing.NamedTuple
Close #2459
• `too-few-public-methods is not reported for dataclasses created with options.
Close #2488
• Remove wrong modules from ’bad-python3-import’.
Close #2453
• The json reporter prints an empty list when no messages are emitted
Close #2446
• Add a new check, duplicate-string-formatting-argument
This new check is emitted whenever a duplicate string formatting argument is found.
Close #497
• assignment-from-no-return is not emitted for coroutines.
Close #1715
• Report format string type mismatches.
• consider-using-ternary and simplified-boolean-expression no longer emit for sequence
based checks
Close #2473
• Handle AstroidSyntaxError when trying to import a module.
Close #2313
• Allow __module__ to be redefined at a class level. Close #2451
• pylint used to emit a unused-variable error if unused import was found in the function. Now instead
of unused-variable, unused-import is emitted.
Close #2421
• Handle asyncio.coroutine when looking for not-an-iterable check.
Close #996
• The locally-enabled check is gone.
Close #2442
• Infer decorated methods when looking for method-hidden
Close #2369
• Pick the latest value from the inferred values when looking for raising-non-exception
Close #2431

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• Extend the TYPE_CHECKING guard to TYPE_CHECKING name as well, not just the attribute
Close #2411
• Ignore import x.y.z as z cases for checker useless-import-alias.
Close #2309
• Fix false positive undefined-variable and used-before-assignment with nonlocal keyword us-
age.
Close #2049
• Stop protected-access exception for missing class attributes
• Don’t emit assignment-from-no-return for decorated function nodes
Close #2385
• unnecessary-pass is now also emitted when a function or class contains only docstring and pass statement.
In Python, stubbed functions often have a body that contains just a single pass statement, indicating
that the function doesn’t do anything. However, a stubbed function can also have just a docstring,
and function with a docstring and no body also does nothing.
Close #2208
• duplicate-argument-name is emitted for more than one duplicate argument per function
Close #1712
• Allow double indentation levels for more distinguishable indentations
Close #741
• Consider tuples in exception handler for try-except-raise. Close #2389
• Fix astroid.ClassDef check in checkers.utils.is_subclass_of
• Fix wildcard imports being ignored by the import checker
• Fix external/internal distinction being broken in the import graph
• Fix wildcard import check not skipping __init__.py
Close #2430
• Add new option to logging checker, logging_format_style
• Fix –ignore-imports to understand multi-line imports
Close #1422 Close #2019
• Add a new check ’implicit-str-concat-in-sequence’ to spot string concatenation inside lists, sets & tuples.
• literal-comparison is now emitted for 0 and 1 literals.

10.10.11 What’s New in Pylint 2.1.1?

Release date: 2018-08-07

• fix pylint crash due to misplaced-format-function not correctly handling class attribute. Close #2384
• Do not emit *-builtin for Python 3 builtin checks when the builtin is used inside a try-except
Close PyCQA/pylint#2228
• simplifiable-if-statement not emitted when dealing with subscripts

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

10.10.12 What’s New in Pylint 2.1?

Release date: 2018-08-01

• trailing-comma-tuple gets emitted for yield statements as well.
Close #2363
• Get only the arguments of the scope function for redefined-argument-from-local
Close #2364
• Add a check misplaced-format-function which is emitted if format function is used on non str object.
Close #2200
• chain.from_iterable no longer emits dict-{}-not-iterating when dealing with dict values and keys
• Demote the try-except-raise message from an error to a warning (E0705 -> W0706)
Close #2323
• Correctly handle the new name of the Python implementation of the abc module.
Close PyCQA/astroid#2288
• Modules with __getattr__ are exempted by default from no-member
There’s no easy way to figure out if a module has a particular member when the said module
uses __getattr__, which is a new addition to Python 3.7. Instead we assume the safe thing to do,
in the same way we do for classes, and skip those modules from checking.
Close #2331
• Fix a false positive invalid name message when method or attribute name is longer then 30
characters.
Close #2047
• Include the type of the next branch in no-else-return
Close #2295
• Fix inconsistent behaviour for bad-continuation on first line of file
Close #2281
• Fix not being able to disable certain messages on the last line through the global disable option
Close #2278
• Don’t emit useless-return when we have a single statement that is the return itself
We still want to be explicit when a function is supposed to return an optional value; even though
pass could still work, it’s not explicit enough and the function might look like it’s missing an
implementation. Close #2300
• Fix false-positive undefined-variable for self referential class name in lamdbas
Close #704
• Don’t crash when pylint is unable to infer the value of an argument to next()
Close #2316
• Don’t emit not-an-iterable when dealing with async iterators.
But do emit it when using the usual iteration protocol against async iterators.

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Close #2311
• Can specify a default docstring type for when the check cannot guess the type
Close #1169

10.10.13 What’s New in Pylint 2.0?

Release date: 2018-07-15

• try-except-raise should not be emitted if there are any parent exception class handlers.
Close #2284
• trailing-comma-tuple can be emitted for return statements as well.
Close #2269
• Fix a false positive inconsistent-return-statements message when exception is raised inside
an else statement.
Close #1782
• ImportFrom nodes correctly use the full name for the import sorting checks.
Close #2181
• [].extend and similar builtin operations don’t emit dict-*-not-iterating with the Python 3 porting checker
Close #2187
• Add a check consider-using-dict-comprehension which is emitted if for dict initialization the old style with
list comprehensions is used.
• Add a check consider-using-set-comprehension which is emitted if for set initialization the old style with
list comprehensions is used.
• logging-not-lazy is emitted whenever pylint infers that a string is built with addition
Close #2193
• Add a check chained-comparison which is emitted if a boolean operation can be simplified by chaining
some of its operations. e.g "a < b and b < c", can be simplified as "a < b < c".
Close #2032
• Add a check consider-using-in for comparisons of a variable against multiple values with "==" and "or"s
instead of checking if the variable is contained "in" a tuple of those values.
• in is considered iterating context for some of the Python 3 porting checkers
Close #2186
• Add –ignore-none flag to control if pylint should warn about no-member where the owner is None
• Fix a false positive related to too-many-arguments and bounded __get__ methods
Close #2172
• mcs as the first parameter of metaclass’s __new__ method was replaced by cls
Close #2028
• assignment-from-no-return considers methods as well.
Close #2081

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• Support typing.TYPE_CHECKING for unused-import errors

Close #1948
• Inferred classes at a function level no longer emit invalid-name when they don’t respect the variable regular
expression
Close #1049
• Added basic support for postponed evaluation of function annotations.
Close #2069
• Fix a bug with missing-kwoa and variadics parameters
Close #1111
• simplifiable-if-statement takes in account only when assigning to same targets
Close #1984
• Make len-as-condition test more cases, such as len() < 1 or len <= 0
• Fix false-positive line-too-long message emission for commented line at the end of a module
Close #1950
• Fix false-positive bad-continuation for with statements
Close #461
• Don’t warn about stop-iteration-return when using next() over itertools.count
Close #2158
• Add a check consider-using-get for unidiomatic usage of value/default-retrieval for a key from a dictionary
Close #2076
• invalid-slice-index is not emitted when the slice is used as index for a complex object.
We only use a handful of known objects (list, set and friends) to figure out if we should emit invalid-slice-
index when the slice is used to subscript an object.
• Don’t emit unused-import anymore for typing imports used in type comments.
• Add a new check ’useless-import-alias’.
Close #2052
• Add comparison-with-callable to warn for comparison with bare callable, without calling it.
Close #2082
• Don’t warn for missing-type-doc and/or missing-return-type-doc, if type annotations exist
on the function signature for a parameter and/or return type. Close #2083
• Add –exit-zero option for continuous integration scripts to more easily call Pylint in environments that
abort when a program returns a non-zero (error) status code.
Close #2042
• Warn if the first argument of an instance/ class method gets assigned
Close #977
• New check comparison-with-itself to check comparison between same value.
Close #2051

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• Add a new warning, ’logging-fstring-interpolation’, emitted when f-string is used within logging function
calls.
Close #1998
• Don’t show ’useless-super-delegation’ if the subclass method has different type annotations.
Close #1923
• Add unhashable-dict-key check.
Closes #586
• Don’t warn that a global variable is unused if it is defined by an import
Close #1453
• Skip wildcard import check for __init__.py.
Close #2026
• The Python 3 porting mode can now run with Python 3 as well.
• too-few-public-methods is not emitted for dataclasses.
Close #1793
• New verbose mode option, enabled with –verbose command line flag, to display of extra non-checker-
related output. It is disabled by default.
Close #1863
• undefined-loop-variable takes in consideration non-empty iterred objects before emitting
Close #2039
• Add support for numpydoc optional return value names.
Close #2030
• singleton-comparison accounts for negative checks
Close #2037
• Add a check consider-using-in for comparisons of a variable against multiple values with "==" and "or"s
instead of checking if the variable is contained "in" a tuple of those values.
Close #1977
• defaultdict and subclasses of dict are now handled for dict-iter-* checks
Close #2005
• logging-format-interpolation also emits when f-strings are used instead of % syntax.
Close #1788
• Don’t trigger misplaced-bare-raise when the raise is in a finally clause
Close #1924
• Add a new check, possibly-unused-variable.
This is similar to unused-variable, the only difference is that it is emitted when we detect a locals() call in
the scope of the unused variable. The locals() call could potentially use the said variable, by consuming
all values that are present up to the point of the call. This new check allows to disable this error when the
user intentionally uses locals() to consume everything.
Close #1909.

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• no-else-return accounts for multiple cases

The check was a bit overrestrictive because we were checking for return nodes in the .orelse node.
At that point though the if statement can be refactored to not have the orelse. This improves the
detection of other cases, for instance it now detects TryExcept nodes that are part of the .else
branch.
Close #1852
• Added two new checks, invalid-envvar-value and invalid-envvar-default.
The former is trigger whenever pylint detects that environment variable manipulation functions uses a
different type than strings, while the latter is emitted whenever the said functions are using a default
variable of different type than expected.
• Add a check consider-using-join for concatenation of strings using str.join(sequence)
Close #1952
• Add a check consider-swap-variables for swapping variables with tuple unpacking
Close #1922
• Add new checker try-except-raise that warns the user if an except handler block has a raise statement
as its first operator. The warning is shown when there is a bare raise statement, effectively re-raising the
exception that was caught or the type of the exception being raised is the same as the one being handled.
• Don’t crash on invalid strings when checking for logging-format-interpolation
Close #1944
• Exempt __doc__ from triggering a redefined-builtin
__doc__ can be used to specify a docstring for a module without passing it as a first-statement string.
• Fix false positive bad-whitespace from function arguments with default values and annotations
Close #1831
• Fix stop-iteration-return false positive when next builtin has a default value in a generator
Close #1830
• Fix emission of false positive no-member message for class with "private" attributes whose name is
mangled.
Close #1643
• Fixed a crash which occurred when Uninferable wasn’t properly handled in stop-iteration-return
Close #1779
• Use the proper node to get the name for redefined functions (#1792)
Close #1774
• Don’t crash when encountering bare raises while checking inconsistent returns
Close #1773
• Fix a false positive inconsistent-return-statements message when if statement is inside
try/except.
Close #1770
• Fix a false positive inconsistent-return-statements message when while loop are used.
Close #1772

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• Correct column number for whitespace conventions.

Previously the column was stuck at 0
Close #1649
• Fix unused-argument false positives with overshadowed variable in dictionary comprehension.
Close #1731
• Fix false positive inconsistent-return-statements message when never returning functions
are used (i.e sys.exit for example).
Close #1771
• Fix error when checking if function is exception, as in bad-exception-context.
• Fix false positive inconsistent-return-statements message when a function is defined under
an if statement.
Close #1794
• New useless-return message when function or method ends with a "return" or "return None" state-
ment and this is the only return statement in the body.
• Fix false positive inconsistent-return-statements message by avoiding useless exception in-
ference if the exception is not handled.
Close #1794 (second part)
• Fix bad thread instantiation check when target function is provided in args.
Close #1840
• Fixed false positive when a numpy Attributes section follows a Parameters section
Close #1867
• Fix incorrect file path when file absolute path contains multiple path_strip_prefix strings.
Close #1120
• Fix false positive undefined-variable for lambda argument in class definitions
Close #1824
• Add of a new checker that warns the user if some messages are enabled or disabled by id instead of symbol.
Close #1599
• Suppress false-positive not-callable messages from certain staticmethod descriptors
Close #1699
• Fix indentation handling with tabs
Close #1148
• Fix false-positive bad-continuation error
Close #638
• Fix false positive unused-variable in lambda default arguments
Close #1921 Close #1552 Close #1099 Close #210
• Updated the default report format to include paths that can be clicked on in some terminals (e.g. iTerm).

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• Fix inline def behavior with too-many-statements checker

Close #1978
• Fix KeyError raised when using docparams and NotImplementedError is documented.
Close #2102
• Fix ’method-hidden’ raised when assigning to a property or data descriptor.
• Fix emitting useless-super-delegation when changing the default value of keyword arguments.
Close #2022
• Expand ignored-argument-names include starred arguments and keyword arguments
Close #2214
• Fix false-positive undefined-variable in nested lambda
Close #760
• Fix false-positive bad-whitespace message for typing annoatations with ellipses in them
Close 1992
• Broke down "missing-docstrings" between "module", "class" and "function"
For this to work we had to make multiple messages with the same old name possible.
Closes #1164

10.10.14 What’s New in Pylint 1.9?

Release date: 2018-05-15

• Added two new Python 3 porting checks, exception-escape and comprehension-escape
These two are emitted whenever pylint detects that a variable defined in the said blocks is used outside of the
given block. On Python 3 these values are deleted.
• Added a new deprecated-sys-function, emitted when accessing removed sys members.
• Added xreadlines-attribute, emitted when the xreadlines() attribute is accessed.
• The Python 3 porting mode can now run with Python 3 as well.
• docparams extension allows abstract methods to document what overriding implementations should return, and
to raise NotImplementedError without documenting it.
Closes #2044
• Special methods do not count towards too-few-methods, and are considered part of the public API.
• Enum classes do not trigger too-few-methods
Close #605
• Added a new Python 2/3 check for accessing operator.div, which is removed in Python 3
Close #1936
• Added a new Python 2/3 check for accessing removed urllib functions
Close #1997

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10.10.15 What’s New in Pylint 1.8.1?

Release date: 2017-12-15

• Wrong version number in __pkginfo__.

10.10.16 What’s New in Pylint 1.8?

Release date: 2017-12-15

• Respect disable=... in config file when running with –py3k.
• New warning shallow-copy-environ added
Shallow copy of os.environ doesn’t work as people may expect. os.environ is not a dict object but
rather a proxy object, so any changes made on copy may have unexpected effects on os.environ
Instead of copy.copy(os.environ) method os.environ.copy() should be used.
See https://bugs.python.org/issue15373 for details.
Close #1301
• Do not display no-absolute-import warning multiple times per file.
• trailing-comma-tuple refactor check now extends to assignment with more than one element
(such as lists)
Close #1713
• Fixing u” string in superfluous-parens message
Close #1420
• abstract-class-instantiated is now emitted for all inference paths.
Close #1673
• Add set of predefined naming style to ease configuration of checking naming conventions.
Closes #1013
• Added a new check, keyword-arg-before-vararg
This is emitted for function definitions in which keyword arguments are placed before variable
positional arguments (*args).
This may lead to args list getting modified if keyword argument’s value is not provided in the func-
tion call assuming it will take default value provided in the definition.
• The invalid-name check contains the name of the template that caused the failure
Close #1176
• Using the -j flag won’t start more child linters than needed.
Contributed by Roman Ivanov in #1614
• Fix a false positive with bad-python3-import on relative imports
Close #1608
• Added a new Python 3 check, non-ascii-bytes-literals
Close #1545
• Added a couple of new Python 3 checks for accessing dict methods in non-iterable context

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• Protocol checks (not-a-mapping, not-an-iterable and co.) aren’t emitted on classes with dynamic
getattr
• Added a new warning, ’bad-thread-instantiation’
This message is emitted when the threading.Thread class does not receive the target argument, but
receives just one argument, which is by default the group parameter.
Close #1327
• In non-quiet mode, absolute path of used config file is logged to standard error. Close #1519
• Raise meaningful exception for invalid reporter class being selected
When unknown reporter class will be selected as Pylint reporter, meaningful error message would
be raised instead of bare ImportError or AttribueError related to module or reporter class
being not found. Close #1388
• Added a new Python 3 check for accessing removed functions from itertools like izip or
ifilterfalse
• Added a new Python 3 check for accessing removed fields from the types module like
UnicodeType or XRangeType
• Added a new Python 3 check for declaring a method next that would have been treated as an
iterator in Python 2 but a normal function in Python 3.
• Added a new key-value pair in json output. The key is message-id and the value is the message
id. Close #1512
• Added a new Python 3.0 check for raising a StopIteration inside a generator. The check about raising
a StopIteration inside a generator is also valid if the exception raised inherit from StopIteration.
Close #1385
• Added a new warning, raising-format-tuple, to detect multi-argument exception construc-
tion instead of message string formatting.
• Added a new check for method of logging module that concatenate string via + operator Close #1479
• Added parameter for limiting number of suggestions in spellchecking checkers
• Fix a corner-case in consider-using-ternary checker.
When object A used in X and A or B was falsy in boolean context, Pylint incorrectly emitted
non-equivalent ternary-based suggestion. After a change message is correctly not emitted for this
case. Close #1559
• Added suggestion-mode configuration flag. When flag is enabled, informational message is
emitted instead of cryptic error message for attributes accessed on c-extensions. Close #1466
• Fix a false positive useless-super-delegation message when parameters default values are
different from those used in the base class. Close #1085
• Disabling ’wrong-import-order’, ’wrong-import-position’, or ’ungrouped-imports’ for a single line
now prevents that line from triggering violations on subsequent lines.
Close #1336
• Added a new Python check for inconsistent return statements inside method or function. Close
#1267
• Fix superfluous-parens false positive related to handling logical statements involving in
operator.
Close #574

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• function-redefined message is no longer emitted for functions and methods which names
matches dummy variable name regular expression. Close #1369
• Fix missing-param-doc and missing-type-doc false positives when mixing Args and
Keyword Args in Google docstring. Close #1409
• Fix missing-docstring false negatives when modules, classes, or methods consist of com-
pound statements that exceed the docstring-min-length
• Fix useless-else-on-loop false positives when break statements are deeply nested inside
loop. Close #1661
• Fix no wrong-import-order message emitted on ordering of first and third party libraries.
With this fix, pylint distinguishes third and first party modules when checking import order. Close
#1702
• Fix pylint disable=fixme directives ignored for comments following the last statement in a
file. Close #1681
• Fix line-too-long message deactivated by wrong disable directive. The directive
disable=fixme doesn’t deactivate anymore the emission of line-too-long message for
long commented lines. Close #1741
• If the rcfile specified on the command line doesn’t exist, then an IOError exception is raised. Close
#1747
• Fix the wrong scope of the disable= directive after a commented line. For example when a
disable=line-too-long directive is at the end of a long commented line, it no longer disables
the emission of line-too-long message for lines that follow. Close #1742

10.10.17 What’s New in Pylint 1.7.1?

Release date: 2017-04-17

• Fix a false positive which occurred when an exception was reraised
Close #1419
• Fix a false positive of disallow-trailing-tuple
The check was improved by verifying for non-terminating newlines, which should exempt function calls and
function definitions from the check Close #1424

10.10.18 What’s New in Pylint 1.7?

Release date: 2017-04-13

• Don’t emit missing-final-newline or trailing-whitespace for formfeeds (page breaks).
Close #1218 and #1219
• Don’t emit by default no-member if we have opaque inference objects in the inference results
This is controlled through the new flag ignore-on-opaque-inference, which is by default True. The inference can
return multiple potential results while evaluating a Python object, but some branches might not be evaluated,
which results in partial inference. In that case, it might be useful to still emit no-member and other checks for
the rest of the inferred objects.
• Added new message assign-to-new-keyword to warn about assigning to names which will become a keyword in
future Python releases.

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

Close #1351
• Split the ’missing or differing’ in parameter documentation in different error. ’differing-param-doc’ covers
the differing part of the old ’missing-param-doc’, and ’differing-type-doc’ covers the differing part of the old
’missing-type-doc’
Close #1342
• Added a new error, ’used-prior-global-declaration’, which is emitted when a name is used prior a global decla-
ration in a function. This causes a SyntaxError in Python 3.6
Close #1257
• The protocol checks are emitting their messages when a special method is set to None.
Close #1263
• Properly detect if imported name is assigned to same name in different scope.
Close #636, #848, #851, and #900
• Require one space for annotations with type hints, as per PEP 8.
• ’trailing-comma-tuple’ check was added
This message is emitted when pylint finds an one-element tuple, created by a stray comma. This can suggest a
potential problem in the code and it is recommended to use parantheses in order to emphasise the creation of a
tuple, rather than relying on the comma itself.
• Don’t emit not-callable for instances with unknown bases.
Close #1213
• Treat keyword only arguments the same as positional arguments with regard to unused-argument check
• Don’t try to access variables defined in a separate scope when checking for protected-access
• Added new check to detect incorrect usage of len(SEQUENCE) inside test conditions.
• Added new extension to detect comparisons against empty string constants
• Added new extension to detect comparisons of integers against zero
• Added new error conditions for ’bad-super-call’
Now detects super(type(self), self) and super(self.__class__, self) which can lead to
recursion loop in derived classes.
• PyLinter.should_analyze_file has a new optional parameter, called is_argument
Close #1079
• Add attribute hints for missing members
Closes #1035
• Add a new warning, ’redefined-argument-from-local’
Closes #649
• Support inline comments for comma separated values in the config file
Closes #1024
• epylint.py_run’s script parameter was removed.
• epylint.py_run now uses shell=False for running the underlying process.
Closes #441

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• Added a new warning, ’useless-super-delegation’

Close 839.
• Added a new error, ’invalid-metaclass’, raised when we can detect that a class is using an improper metaclass.
Close #579
• Added a new refactoring message, ’literal-comparison’.
Close #786
• arguments-differ takes in consideration kwonlyargs and variadics
Close #983
• Removed –optimized-ast. Part of #975.
• Removed –files-output option. Part of #975.
• Removed pylint-gui from the package.
• Removed the HTML reporter. Part of #975.
• ignored-argument-names is now used for ignoring arguments for unused-variable check.
This option was used for ignoring arguments when computing the correct number of arguments a function
should have, but for handling the arguments with regard to unused-variable check, dummy-variables-rgx was
used instead. Now, ignored-argument-names is used for its original purpose and also for ignoring the matched
arguments for the unused-variable check. This offers a better control of what should be ignored and how. Also,
the same option was moved from the design checker to the variables checker, which means that the option now
appears under the [VARIABLES] section inside the configuration file. Close #862.
• Fix a false positive for keyword variadics with regard to keyword only arguments.
If a keyword only argument was necessary for a function, but that function was called with keyword variadics
(**kwargs), then we were emitting a missing-kwoa false positive, which is now fixed.
Close #934.
• Fix some false positives with unknown sized variadics.
Close #878
• Added a new extension, check_docstring, for checking PEP 257 conventions.
Closes #868.
• config files with BOM markers can now be read.
Close #864.
• epylint.py_run does not crash on big files, using .communicate() instead of .wait()
Close #599
• Disable reports by default and show the evaluation score by default
As per discussion from issue #746, the reports were disabled by default in order to simplify the interaction
between the tool and the users. The score is still shown by default, as a way of closely measuring when it
increases or decreases due to changes brought to the code.
• Disable the information category messages by default.
This is a step towards making pylint more sane, as per the discussion from issue #746.
• Catch more cases as not proper iterables for __slots__ with regard to invalid-slots pattern. Closes issue #775.
• empty indent strings are rejected.

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• Added a new error, ’relative-beyond-top-level’, which is emitted when a relative import was attempted beyond
the top level package.
Closes issue #588.
• Added a new warning, ’unsupported-assignment-operation’, which is emitted when item assignment is tried on
an object which doesn’t have this ability. Closes issue #591.
• Added a new warning, ’unsupported-delete-operation’, which is emitted when item deletion is tried on an object
which doesn’t have this ability. Closes issue #592.
• Fix a false positive of ’redundant-returns-doc’, occurred when the documented function was using yield instead
of return.
Closes issue #984.
• Fix false positives of ’missing-[raises|params|type]-doc’ due to not recognizing keyword synonyms supported
by Sphinx.
• Added a new refactoring message, ’consider-merging-isinstance’, which is emitted whenever we can detect that
consecutive isinstance calls can be merged together.
Closes issue #968
• Fix a false positive of ’missing-param-doc’ and ’missing-type-doc’, occurred when a class docstring uses the
’For the parameters, see’ magic string but the class __init__ docstring does not, or vice versa.
• redefined-outer-name is now also emitted when a nested loop’s target variable is the same as a target variable in
an outer loop.
Closes issue #911.
• Added proper exception type inference for ’missing-raises-doc’.
• Added InvalidMessageError exception class to replace asserts in pylint.utils.
• More thorough validation in MessagesStore.register_messages() to avoid one message accidentally overwriting
another.
• InvalidMessageError, UnknownMessage, and EmptyReport exceptions are moved to the new pylint.exceptions
submodule.
• UnknownMessage and EmptyReport are renamed to UnknownMessageError and EmptyReportError.
• Warnings ’missing-returns-type-doc’ and ’missing-yields-type-doc’ have each been split into two warnings -
’missing-[return|yield]-doc’ and ’missing-[return|yield]-type-doc’.
• Added epytext support to docparams extension.
Closes #1029.
• Support having plugins with the same name and with options defined
Closes #1018
• Sort configuration options in a section
Closes #1087
• Added a new Python 3 warning around implementing ’__div__’, ’__idiv__’, or ’__rdiv__’ as those methods are
phased out in Python 3.
• Added a new warning, ’overlapping-except’, which is emitted when two exceptions in the same except-clause
are aliases for each other or one exceptions is an ancestor of another.
• Avoid crashing on ill-formatted strings when checking for string formatting errors.

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• Added a new Python 3 warning for calling ’str.encode’ or ’str.decode’ with a non-text encoding.
• Added new coding convention message, ’single-string-used-for-slots’.
Closes #1166
• Added a new Python 3 check for accessing ’sys.maxint’ which was removed in Python 3 in favor of ’sys.maxsize’
• Added a new Python 3 check for bad imports.
• Added a new Python 3 check for accessing deprecated string functions.
• Do not warn about unused arguments or function being redefined in singledispatch registered implementations.
Closes #1032 and #1034
• Added refactoring message ’no-else-return’.
• Improve unused-variable checker to warn about unused variables in module scope.
Closes #919
• Ignore modules import as _ when checking for unused imports.
Closes #1190
• Improve handing of Python 3 classes with metaclasses declared in nested scopes.
Closes #1177
• Added refactoring message ’consider-using-ternary’.
Closes #1204
• Bug-fix for false-positive logging-format-interpolation‘ when format specifications are used in formatted string.
Fixes #572
• Added a new switch single-line-class-stmt to allow single-line declaration of empty class bodies.
Closes #738
• Protected access in form type(self)._attribute are now allowed.
Fixes #1031
• Let the user modify msg-template when Pylint is called from a Python script
Fixes #1269
• Imports checker supports new switch allow-wildcard-with-all which disables warning on wildcard
import when imported module defines __all__ variable.
Fixes #831
• too-many-format-args and too-few-format-args are emitted correctly when starred expression are used in RHS
tuple.
Fixes #957
• cyclic-import checker supports local disable clauses. When one of cycle imports was done in scope where
disable clause was active, cycle is not reported as violation.
Fixes #59

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10.10.19 What’s new in Pylint 1.6.3?

Release date: 2016-07-18

• Do not crash when inferring uninferable exception types for docparams extension
Close #998

10.10.20 What’s new in Pylint 1.6.2?

Release date: TBA

• Do not crash when printing the help of options with default regular expressions
Close #990
• More granular versions for deprecated modules.
Close #991

10.10.21 What’s new in Pylint 1.6.1?

Release date: 2016-07-07

• Use environment markers for supporting conditional dependencies.

10.10.22 What’s New in Pylint 1.6.0?

Release date: 2016-07-03

• Added a new extension, pylint.extensions.mccabe, for warning about complexity in code.
• Deprecate support for –optimize-ast. Part of #975.
• Deprecate support for the HTML output. Part of #975.
• Deprecate support for –output-files. Part of #975.
• Fixed a documentation error for the check_docs extension. Fixes #735.
• Made the list of property-defining decorators configurable.
• Fix a bug where the top name of a qualified import was detected as unused variable.
Close #923.
• bad-builtin is now an extension check.
• generated-members support qualified name through regular expressions.
For instance, one can specify a regular expression as –generated-members=astroid.node_classes.* for ignoring
every no-member error that is accessed as in astroid.node_classes.missing.object.
• Add the ability to ignore files based on regex matching, with the new --ignore-patterns option.
This addresses issue #156 by allowing for multiple ignore patterns to be specified. Rather than clobber the
existing ignore option, we introduced a new one called ignore-patterns.
• Added a new error, ’trailing-newlines’, which is emitted when a file has trailing new lines.
Closes issue #682.

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• Add a new option, ’redefining-builtins-modules’, for controlling the modules which can redefine builtins, such
as six.moves and future.builtins.
Close #464.
• ’reimported’ is emitted when the same name is imported from different module.
Close #162.
• Add a new recommendation checker, ’consider-iterating-dictionary’, which is emitted which is emitted when a
dictionary is iterated through .keys().
Close #699
• Use the configparser backport for Python 2
This fixes a problem we were having with comments inside values, which is fixed in Python 3’s configparser.
Close #828
• A new error was added, ’invalid-length-returned’, when the __len__ special method returned something else
than a non-negative number.
Close issue #557
• Switch to using isort internally for wrong-import-order.
Closes #879.
• check_docs extension can find constructor parameters in __init__.
Closes #887.
• Don’t warn about invalid-sequence-index if the indexed object has unknown base classes.
Closes #867
• Don’t crash when checking, for super-init-not-called, a method defined in an if block.
• Do not emit import-error or no-name-in-module for fallback import blocks by default.
Until now, we warned with these errors when a fallback import block (a TryExcept block that contained
imports for Python 2 and 3) was found, but this gets cumbersome when trying to write compatible code.
As such, we don’t check these blocks by default, but the analysis can be enforced by using the new
--analyse-fallback-block flag.
Close #769.

10.10.23 What’s New in Pylint 1.5.5?

Release date: 2016-03-21

• Let visit_importfrom from Python 3 porting checker be called when everything is disabled
Because the visit method was filtering the patterns it was expecting to be activated, it didn’t run when everything
but one pattern was disabled, leading to spurious false positives
Close #852
• Don’t emit unsubscriptable-value for classes with unknown base classes.
Close #776.
• Use an OrderedDict for storing the configuration elements
This fixes an issue related to impredictible order of the disable / enable elements from a config file. In certain
cases, the disable was coming before the enable which resulted in classes of errors to be enabled, even though

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the intention was to disable them. The best example for this was in the context of running multiple processes,
each one of it having different enables / disables that affected the output.
Close #815
• Don’t consider bare and broad except handlers as ignoring NameError, AttributeError and similar exceptions, in
the context of checkers for these issues.
Closes issue #826

10.10.24 What’s New in Pylint 1.5.4?

Release date: 2016-01-15

• Merge StringMethodChecker with StringFormatChecker. This fixes a bug where disabling all the messages and
enabling only a handful of messages from the StringFormatChecker would have resulted in no messages at all.
• Don’t apply unneeded-not over sets.

10.10.25 What’s New in Pylint 1.5.3?

Release date: 2016-01-11

• Handle the import fallback idiom with regard to wrong-import-order.
Closes issue #750.
• Decouple the displaying of reports from the displaying of messages
Some reporters are aggregating the messages instead of displaying them when they are available. The actual
displaying was conflatted in the generate_reports. Unfortunately this behaviour was flaky and in the case of the
JSON reporter, the messages weren’t shown at all if a file had syntax errors or if it was missing. In order to
fix this, the aggregated messages can now be displayed with Reporter.display_message, while the reports are
displayed with display_reports.
Closes issues #766 and #765.
• Ignore function calls with variadic arguments without a context.
Inferring variadic positional arguments and keyword arguments will result into empty Tuples and Dicts, which
can lead in some cases to false positives with regard to no-value-for-parameter. In order to avoid this, until we’ll
have support for call context propagation, we’re ignoring such cases if detected. Closes issue #722.
• Treat AsyncFunctionDef just like FunctionDef nodes, by implementing visit_asyncfunctiondef in terms of
visit_functiondef.
Closes issue #767.
• Take in account kwonlyargs when verifying that arguments are defined with the check_docs extension.
Closes issue #745.
• Suppress reporting ’unneeded-not’ inside __ne__ methods
Closes issue #749.

10.10.26 What’s New in Pylint 1.5.2?

Release date: 2015-12-21

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• Don’t crash if graphviz is not installed, instead emit a warning letting the user to know.
Closes issue #168.
• Accept only functions and methods for the deprecated-method checker.
This prevents a crash which can occur when an object doesn’t have .qname() method after the inference.
• Don’t emit super-on-old-class on classes with unknown bases. Closes issue #721.
• Allow statements in if or try blocks containing imports.
Closes issue #714.

10.10.27 What’s New in Pylint 1.5.1?

Release date: 2015-12-02

• Fix a crash which occurred when old visit methods are encountered in plugin modules. Closes issue #711.
• Add wrong-import-position to check_messages’s decorator arguments for ImportChecker.leave_module This
fixes an esoteric bug which occurs when ungrouped-imports and wrong-import-order are disabled and pylint
is executed on multiple files. What happens is that without wrong-import-position in check_messages,
leave_module will never be called, which means that the first non-import node from other files might leak
into the current file, leading to wrong-import-position being emitted by pylint.
• Fix a crash which occurred when old visit methods are encountered in plugin modules. Closes issue #711.
• Don’t emit import-self and cyclic-import for relative imports of modules with the same name as the package
itself. Closes issues #708 and #706.

10.10.28 What’s New in Pylint 1.5.0?

Release date: 2015-11-29

• Added multiple warnings related to imports. ’wrong-import-order’ is emitted when PEP 8 recommendations
regarding imports are not respected (that is, standard imports should be followed by third-party imports and
then by local imports). ’ungrouped-imports’ is emitted when imports from the same package or module are not
placed together, but scattered around in the code. ’wrong-import-position’ is emitted when code is mixed with
imports, being recommended for the latter to be at the top of the file, in order to figure out easier by a human
reader what dependencies a module has. Closes issue #692.
• Added a new refactoring warning, ’unneeded-not’, emitted when an expression with the not operator could be
simplified. Closes issue #670.
• Added a new refactoring warning, ’simplifiable-if-statement’, used when an if statement could be reduced to a
boolean evaluation of its test. Closes issue #698.
• Added a new refactoring warning, ’too-many-boolean-expressions’, used when an if statement contains too
many boolean expressions, which makes the code less maintainable and harder to understand. Closes issue
#677.
• Property methods are shown as attributes instead of functions in pyreverse class diagrams. Closes Issue #284
• Add a new refactoring error, ’too-many-nested-blocks’, which is emitted when a function or a method has too
many nested blocks, which makes the code less readable and harder to understand. Closes issue #668.
• Add a new error, ’unsubscriptable-object’, that is emitted when value used in subscription expression doesn’t
support subscription (i.e. doesn’t define __getitem__ method).
• Don’t warn about abstract classes instantiated in their own body. Closes issue #627.

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• Obsolete options are not present by default in the generated configuration file. Closes issue #632.
• non-iterator-returned can detect classes with iterator-metaclasses. Closes issue #679.
• Add a new error, ’unsupported-membership-test’, emitted when value to the right of the ’in’ operator doesn’t
support membership test protocol (i.e. doesn’t define __contains__/__iter__/__getitem__)
• Add new errors, ’not-an-iterable’, emitted when non-iterable value is used in an iterating context (starargs, for-
statement, comprehensions, etc), and ’not-a-mapping’, emitted when non-mapping value is used in a mapping
context. Closes issue #563.
• Make ’no-self-use’ checker not emit a warning if there is a ’super()’ call inside the method. Closes issue #667.
• Add checker to identify multiple imports on one line. Closes issue #598.
• Fix unused-argument false positive when the "+=" operator is used. Closes issue #518.
• Don’t emit import-error for ignored modules. PyLint will not emit import errors for any import which is, or is a
subpackage of, a module in the ignored-modules list. Closes issue #223.
• Fix unused-import false positive when the import is used in a class assignment. Closes issue #475
• Add a new error, ’not-context-manager’, emitted when something that doesn’t implement __enter__ and
__exit__ is used in a with statement.
• Add a new warning, ’confusing-with-statement’, emitted by the base checker, when an ambiguous looking with
statement is used. For example with open() as first, second which looks like a tuple assignment but is actually 2
context managers.
• Add a new warning, ’duplicate-except’, emitted when there is an exception handler which handles an exception
type that was handled before. Closes issue #485.
• A couple of warnings got promoted to errors, since they could uncover potential bugs in the code. These warn-
ings are: assignment-from-none, unbalanced-tuple-unpacking, unpacking-non-sequence, non-iterator-returned.
Closes issue #388.
• Allow ending a pragma control with a semicolon. In this way, users can continue a pragma control with a reason
for why it is used, as in # pylint: disable=old-style-class;reason=.... Closes issue #449.
• –jobs can be used with –load-plugins now. Closes issue #456.
• Improve the performance of –jobs when dealing only with a package name. Closes issue #479.
• Don’t emit an unused-wildcard-import when the imported name comes from another module and it is in fact a
__future__ name.
• The colorized reporter now works on Windows. Closes issue #96.
• Remove pointless-except warning. It was previously disabled by default and it wasn’t very useful. Closes issue
#506.
• Fix a crash on Python 3 related to the string checker, which crashed when it encountered a bytes string with a
.format method called.
• Don’t warn about no-self-use for builtin properties.
• Fix a false positive for bad-reversed-sequence, when a subclass of a dict provides a __reversed__ method.
• Change the default no-docstring-rgx so missing-docstring isn’t emitted for private functions.
• Don’t emit redefined-outer-name for __future__ directives. Closes issue #520.
• Provide some hints for the bad-builtin message. Closes issue #522.
• When checking for invalid arguments to a callable, in typecheck.py, look up for the __init__ in case the found
__new__ comes from builtins.

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Since the __new__ comes from builtins, it will not have attached any information regarding what parameters
it expects, so the check will be useless. Retrieving __init__ in that case will at least detect a couple of false
negatives. Closes issue #429.
• Don’t emit no-member for classes with unknown bases.
Since we don’t know what those bases might add, we simply ignore the error in this case.
• Lookup in the implicit metaclass when checking for no-member, if the class in question has an implicit meta-
class, which is True for new style classes. Closes issue #438.
• Add two new warnings, duplicate-bases and inconsistent-mro.
duplicate-bases is emitted when a class has the same bases listed more than once in its bases definition, while
inconsistent-mro is emitted when no sane mro hierarchy can be determined. Closes issue #526.
• Remove interface-not-implemented warning. Closes issue #532.
• Remove the rest of interface checks: interface-is-not-class, missing-interface-method, unresolved-interface. The
reason is that its better to start recommending ABCs instead of the old Zope era of interfaces. One side effect of
this change is that ignore-iface-methods becomes a noop, it’s deprecated and it will be removed at some time.
• Emit a proper deprecation warning for reporters.BaseReporter.add_message.
The alternative way is to use handle_message. add_message will be removed in Pylint 1.6.
• Added new module ’extensions’ for optional checkers with the test directory ’test/extensions’ and documenta-
tion file ’doc/extensions.rst’.
• Added new checker ’extensions.check_docs’ that verifies parameter documention in Sphinx, Google, and
Numpy style.
• Detect undefined variable cases, where the "definition" of an undefined variable was in del statement. Instead
of emitting used-before-assignment, which is totally misleading, it now emits undefined-variable. Closes issue
#528.
• Don’t emit attribute-defined-outside-init and access-member-before-definition for mixin classes. Actual errors
can occur in mixin classes, but this is controlled by the ignore-mixin-members option. Closes issue #412.
• Improve the detection of undefined variables and variables used before assignment for variables used as default
arguments to function, where the variable was first defined in the class scope. Closes issue #342 and issue #404.
• Add a new warning, ’unexpected-special-method-signature’, which is emitted when a special method (dunder
method) doesn’t have the expected signature, which can lead to actual errors in the application code. Closes
issue #253.
• Remove ’bad-context-manager’ due to the inclusion of ’unexpected-special-method-signature’.
• Don’t emit no-name-in-module if the import is guarded by an ImportError, Exception or a bare except clause.
• Don’t emit no-member if the attribute access node is protected by an except handler, which handles AttributeEr-
ror, Exception or it is a bare except.
• Don’t emit import-error if the import is guarded by an ImportError, Exception or a bare except clause.
• Don’t emit undefined-variable if the node is guarded by a NameError, Exception or bare except clause.
• Add a new warning, ’using-constant-test’, which is emitted when a conditional statement (If, IfExp) uses a test
which is always constant, such as numbers, classes, functions etc. This is most likely an error from the user’s
part. Closes issue #524.
• Don’t emit ’raising-non-exception’ when the exception has unknown bases. We don’t know what those bases
actually are and it’s better to assume that the user knows what he is doing rather than emitting a message which
can be considered a false positive.

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• Look for a .pylintrc configuration file in the current folder, if pylintrc is not found. Dotted pylintrc files will not
be searched in the parents of the current folder, as it is done for pylintrc.
• Add a new error, ’invalid-unary-type-operand’, emitted when an unary operand is used on something which
doesn’t support that operation (for instance, using the unary bitwise inversion operator on an instance which
doesn’t implement __invert__).
• Take in consideration differences between arguments of various type of functions (classmethods, staticmethods,
properties) when checking for arguments-differ. Closes issue #548.
• astroid.inspector was moved to pylint.pyreverse, since it belongs there and it doesn’t need to be in astroid.
• astroid.utils.LocalsVisitor was moved to pylint.pyreverse.LocalsVisitor.
• pylint.checkers.utils.excepts_import_error was removed. Use pylint.chekcers.utils.error_of_type instead.
• Don’t emit undefined-all-variables for nodes which can’t be inferred (YES nodes).
• yield-outside-func is also emitted for yield from.
• Add a new error, ’too-many-star-expressions’, emitted when there are more than one starred expression (*x) in
an assignment. The warning is emitted only on Python 3.
• Add a new error, ’invalid-star-assignment-target’, emitted when a starred expression (*x) is used as the lhs side
of an assignment, as in *x = [1, 2]. This is not a SyntaxError on Python 3 though.
• Detect a couple of objects which can’t be base classes (bool, slice, range and memoryview, which weren’t
detected until now).
• Add a new error for the Python 3 porting checker, import-star-module-level, which is used when a star import
is detected in another scope than the module level, which is an error on Python 3. Using this will emit a
SyntaxWarning on Python 2.
• Add a new error, ’star-needs-assignment-target’, emitted on Python 3 when a Starred expression (*x) is not used
in an assignment target. This is not caught when parsing the AST on Python 3, so it needs to be a separate check.
• Add a new error, ’unsupported-binary-operation’, emitted when two a binary arithmetic operation is executed
between two objects which don’t support it (a number plus a string for instance). This is currently disabled,
since the it exhibits way too many false positives, but it will be reenabled as soon as possible.
• New imported features from astroid into pyreverse: pyreverse.inspector.Project, pyre-
verse.inspector.project_from_files and pyreverse.inspector.interfaces.
These were moved since they didn’t belong in astroid.
• Enable misplaced-future for Python 3. Closes issue #580.
• Add a new error, ’nonlocal-and-global’, which is emitted when a name is found to be both nonlocal and global
in the same scope. Closes issue #581.
• ignored-classes option can work with qualified names (ignored-classes=optparse.Values) Closes issue #297.
• ignored-modules can work with qualified names as well as with Unix pattern matching for recursive ignoring.
Closes issues #244.
• Improve detection of relative imports in non-packages, as well as importing missing modules with a relative
import from a package.
• Don’t emit no-init if not all the bases from a class are known. Closes issue #604.
• –no-space-check option accepts empty-line as a possible option. Closes issue #541.
• –generate-rcfile generates by default human readable symbols for the –disable option. Closes issue #608.
• Improved the not-in-loop checker to properly detect more cases.

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• Add a new error, ’continue-in-finally’, which is emitted when the continue keyword is found inside a finally
clause, which is a SyntaxError.
• The –zope flag is deprecated and it is slated for removal in Pylint 1.6.
The reason behind this removal is the fact that it’s a specialized flag and there are solutions for the original prob-
lem: use –generated-members with the members that causes problems when using Zope or add AST transforms
tailored to the zope project.
At the same time, –include-ids and –symbols will also be removed in Pylint 1.6. Closes issue #570.
• missing-module-attribute was removed and the corresponding CLI option, required-attributes, which is slated
for removal in Pylint 1.6.
• missing-reversed-argument was removed.
The reason behind this is that this kind of errors should be detected by the type checker for all the builtins and
not as a special case for the reversed builtin. This will happen shortly in the future.
• –comment flag is obsolete and it will be removed in Pylint 1.6.
• –profile flag is obsolete and it will be removed in Pylint 1.6.
• Add a new error, ’misplaced-bare-raise’.
The error is used when a bare raise is not used inside an except clause. This can generate a RuntimeError in
Python, if there are no active exceptions to be reraised. While it works in Python 2 due to the fact that the
exception leaks outside of the except block, it’s nevertheless a behaviour that a user shouldn’t depend upon,
since it’s not obvious to the reader of the code what exception will be raised and it will not be compatible with
Python 3 anyhow. Closes issue #633.
• Bring logilab-common’s ureports into pylint.reporters.
With this change, we moved away from depending on logilab-common, having in Pylint all the components that
were used from logilab-common. The API should be considered an implementation detail and can change at
some point in the future. Closes issue #621.
• reimported is emitted for reimported objects on the same line.
Closes issue #639.
• Abbreviations of command line options are not supported anymore.
Using abbreviations for CLI options was never considered to be a feature of pylint, this fact being only a side
effect of using optparse. As this was the case, using –load-plugin or other abbreviation for –load-plugins never
actually worked, while it also didn’t raise an error. Closes issue #424.
• Add a new error, ’nonlocal-without-binding’
The error is emitted on Python 3 when a nonlocal name is not bound to any variable in the parents scopes.
Closes issue #582.
• ’deprecated-module’ can be shown for modules which aren’t available. Closes issue #362.
• Don’t consider a class abstract if its members can’t be properly inferred.
This fixes a false positive related to abstract-class-instantiated. Closes issue #648.
• Add a new checker for the async features added by PEP 492.
• Add a new error, ’yield-inside-async-function’, emitted on Python 3.5 and upwards when the yield statement is
found inside a new coroutine function (PEP 492).
• Add a new error, ’not-async-context-manager’, emitted when an async context manager block is used with an
object which doesn’t support this protocol (PEP 492).

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• Add a new convention warning, ’singleton-comparison’, emitted when comparison to True, False or None is
found.
• Don’t emit ’assigning-non-slot’ for descriptors. Closes issue #652.
• Add a new error, ’repeated-keyword’, when a keyword argument is passed multiple times into a function call.
This is similar with redundant-keyword-arg, but it’s mildly different that it needs to be a separate error.
• –enable=all can now be used. Closes issue #142.
• Add a new convention message, ’misplaced-comparison-constant’, emitted when a constant is placed in the left
hand side of a comparison, as in ’5 == func()’. This is also called Yoda condition, since the flow of code reminds
of the Star Wars green character, conditions usually encountered in languages with variabile assignments in
conditional statements.
• Add a new convention message, ’consider-using-enumerate’, which is emitted when code that uses range and
len for iterating is encountered. Closes issue #684.
• Added two new refactoring messages, ’no-classmethod-decorator’ and ’no-staticmethod-decorator’, which are
emitted when a static method or a class method is declared without using decorators syntax.
Closes issue #675.

10.10.29 What’s New in Pylint 1.4.3?

Release date: 2015-03-14

• Remove three warnings: star-args, abstract-class-little-used, abstract-class-not-used. These warnings don’t add
any real value and they don’t imply errors or problems in the code.
• Added a new option for controlling the peephole optimizer in astroid. The option --optimize-ast will
control the peephole optimizer, which is used to optimize a couple of AST subtrees. The current problem solved
by the peephole optimizer is when multiple joined strings, with the addition operator, are encountered. If the
numbers of such strings is high enough, Pylint will then fail with a maximum recursion depth exceeded error,
due to its visitor architecture. The peephole just transforms such calls, if it can, into the final resulting string
and this exhibit a problem, because the visit_binop method stops being called (in the optimized AST it will be
a Const node).

10.10.30 What’s New in Pylint 1.4.2?

Release date: 2015-03-11

• Don’t require a docstring for empty modules. Closes issue #261.
• Fix a false positive with too-few-format-args string warning, emitted when the string format contained a normal
positional argument (’{0}’), mixed with a positional argument which did an attribute access (’{0.__class__}’).
Closes issue #463.
• Take in account all the methods from the ancestors when checking for too-few-public-methods. Closes issue
#471.
• Catch enchant errors and emit ’invalid-characters-in-docstring’ when checking for spelling errors. Closes issue
#469.
• Use all the inferred statements for the super-init-not-called check. Closes issue #389.
• Add a new warning, ’unichr-builtin’, emitted by the Python 3 porting checker, when the unichr builtin is found.
Closes issue #472.

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• Add a new warning, ’intern-builtin’, emitted by the Python 3 porting checker, when the intern builtin is found.
Closes issue #473.
• Add support for editable installations.
• The HTML output accepts the –msg-template option. Patch by Dan Goldsmith.
• Add ’map-builtin-not-iterating’ (replacing ’implicit-map-evaluation’), ’zip-builtin-not-iterating’, ’range-builtin-
not-iterating’, and ’filter-builtin-not-iterating’ which are emitted by –py3k when the appropriate built-in is not
used in an iterating context (semantics taken from 2to3).
• Add a new warning, ’unidiomatic-typecheck’, emitted when an explicit typecheck uses type() instead of isin-
stance(). For example, type(x) == Y instead of isinstance(x, Y). Patch by Chris Rebert. Closes issue #299.
• Add support for combining the Python 3 checker mode with the –jobs flag (–py3k and –jobs). Closes issue
#467.
• Add a new warning for the Python 3 porting checker, ’using-cmp-argument’, emitted when the cmp argument
for the list.sort or sorted builtin is encountered.
• Make the –py3k flag commutative with the -E flag. Also, this patch fixes the leaks of error messages from the
Python 3 checker when the errors mode was activated. Closes issue #437.

10.10.31 What’s New in Pylint 1.4.1?

Release date: 2015-01-16

• Look only in the current function’s scope for bad-super-call. Closes issue #403.
• Check the return of properties when checking for not-callable. Closes issue #406.
• Warn about using the input() or round() built-ins for Python 3. Closes issue #411.
• Proper abstract method lookup while checking for abstract-class-instantiated. Closes issue #401.
• Use a mro traversal for finding abstract methods. Closes issue #415.
• Fix a false positive with catching-non-exception and tuples of exceptions.
• Fix a false negative with raising-non-exception, when the raise used an uninferrable exception context.
• Fix a false positive on Python 2 for raising-bad-type, when raising tuples in the form ’raise (ZeroDivisionError,
None)’.
• Fix a false positive with invalid-slots-objects, where the slot entry was a unicode string on Python 2. Closes
issue #421.
• Add a new warning, ’redundant-unittest-assert’, emitted when using unittest’s methods assertTrue and assert-
False with constant value as argument. Patch by Vlad Temian.
• Add a new JSON reporter, usable through -f flag.
• Add the method names for the ’signature-differs’ and ’argument-differs’ warnings. Closes issue #433.
• Don’t compile test files when installing.
• Fix a crash which occurred when using multiple jobs and the files given as argument didn’t exist at all.

10.10.32 What’s New in Pylint 1.4.0?

Release date: 2014-11-23

10.10. Pylint’s ChangeLog 153

Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• Added new options for controlling the loading of C extensions. By default, only C extensions from the stdlib
will be loaded into the active Python interpreter for inspection, because they can run arbitrary code on import.
The option –extension-pkg-whitelist can be used to specify modules or packages that are safe to load.
• Change default max-line-length to 100 rather than 80
• Drop BaseRawChecker class which were only there for backward compat for a while now
• Don’t try to analyze string formatting with objects coming from function arguments. Closes issue #373.
• Port source code to be Python 2/3 compatible. This drops the need for 2to3, but does drop support for Python
2.5.
• Each message now comes with a confidence level attached, and can be filtered base on this level. This allows to
filter out all messages that were emitted even though an inference failure happened during checking.
• Improved presenting unused-import message. Closes issue #293.
• Add new checker for finding spelling errors. New messages: wrong-spelling-in-comment, wrong-spelling-in-
docstring. New options: spelling-dict, spelling-ignore-words.
• Add new ’-j’ option for running checks in sub-processes.
• Added new checks for line endings if they are mixed (LF vs CRLF) or if they are not as expected. New messages:
mixed-line-endings, unexpected-line-ending-format. New option: expected-line-ending-format.
• ’dangerous-default-value’ no longer evaluates the value of the arguments, which could result in long error mes-
sages or sensitive data being leaked. Closes issue #282
• Fix a false positive with string formatting checker, when encountering a string which uses only position-based
arguments. Closes issue #285.
• Fix a false positive with string formatting checker, when using keyword argument packing. Closes issue #288.
• Proper handle class level scope for lambdas.
• Handle ’too-few-format-args’ or ’too-many-format-args’ for format strings with both named and positional
fields. Closes issue #286.
• Analyze only strings by the string format checker. Closes issue #287.
• Properly handle nested format string fields. Closes issue #294.
• Don’t emit ’attribute-defined-outside-init’ if the attribute was set by a function call in a defining method. Closes
issue #192.
• Properly handle unicode format strings for Python 2. Closes issue #296.
• Don’t emit ’import-error’ if an import was protected by a try-except, which excepted ImportError.
• Fix an ’unused-import’ false positive, when the error was emitted for all the members imported with ’from
import’ form. Closes issue #304.
• Don’t emit ’invalid-name’ when assigning a name in an ImportError handler. Closes issue #302.
• Don’t count branches from nested functions.
• Fix a false positive with ’too-few-format-args’, when the format strings contains duplicate manual position
arguments. Closes issue #310.
• fixme regex handles comments without spaces after the hash. Closes issue #311.
• Don’t emit ’unused-import’ when a special object is imported (__all__, __doc__ etc.). Closes issue #309.
• Look in the metaclass, if defined, for members not found in the current class. Closes issue #306.
• Don’t emit ’protected-access’ if the attribute is accessed using a property defined at the class level.

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• Detect calls of the parent’s __init__, through a binded super() call.

• Check that a class has an explicitly defined metaclass before emitting ’old-style-class’ for Python 2.
• Emit ’catching-non-exception’ for non-class nodes. Closes issue #303.
• Order of reporting is consistent.
• Add a new warning, ’boolean-datetime’, emitted when an instance of ’datetime.time’ is used in a boolean con-
text. Closes issue #239.
• Fix a crash which occurred while checking for ’method-hidden’, when the parent frame was something different
than a function.
• Generate html output for missing files. Closes issue #320.
• Fix a false positive with ’too-many-format-args’, when the format string contains mixed attribute access argu-
ments and manual fields. Closes issue #322.
• Extend the cases where ’undefined-variable’ and ’used-before-assignment’ can be detected. Closes issue #291.
• Add support for customising callback identifiers, by adding a new ’–callbacks’ command line option. Closes
issue #326.
• Add a new warning, ’logging-format-interpolation’, emitted when .format() string interpolation is used within
logging function calls.
• Don’t emit ’unbalanced-tuple-unpacking’ when the rhs of the assignment is a variable length argument. Closes
issue #329.
• Add a new warning, ’inherit-non-class’, emitted when a class inherits from something which is not a class.
Closes issue #331.
• Fix another false positives with ’undefined-variable’, where the variable can be found as a class assignment and
used in a function annotation. Closes issue #342.
• Handle assignment of the string format method to a variable. Closes issue #351.
• Support wheel packaging format for PyPi. Closes issue #334.
• Check that various built-ins that do not exist in Python 3 are not used: apply, basestring, buffer, cmp, coerce,
execfile, file, long raw_input, reduce, StandardError, unicode, reload and xrange.
• Warn for magic methods which are not used in any way in Python 3: __coerce__, __delslice__, __getslice__,
__setslice__, __cmp__, __oct__, __nonzero__ and __hex__.
• Don’t emit ’assigning-non-slot’ when the assignment is for a property. Closes issue #359.
• Fix for regression: ’{path}’ was no longer accepted in ’–msg-template’.
• Report the percentage of all messages, not just for errors and warnings. Closes issue #319.
• ’too-many-public-methods’ is reported only for methods defined in a class, not in its ancestors. Closes issue
#248.
• ’too-many-lines’ disable pragma can be located on any line, not only the first. Closes issue #321.
• Warn in Python 2 when an import statement is found without a corresponding from __future__ import abso-
lute_import.
• Warn in Python 2 when a non-floor division operation is found without a corresponding from __future__ import
division.
• Add a new option, ’exclude-protected’, for excluding members from the protected-access warning. Closes issue
#48.
• Warn in Python 2 when using dict.iter*(), dict.view*(); none of these methods are available in Python 3.

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• Warn in Python 2 when calling an object’s next() method; Python 3 uses __next__() instead.
• Warn when assigning to __metaclass__ at a class scope; in Python 3 a metaclass is specified as an argument to
the ’class’ statement.
• Warn when performing parameter tuple unpacking; it is not supported in Python 3.
• ’abstract-class-instantiated’ is also emitted for Python 2. It was previously disabled.
• Add ’long-suffix’ error, emitted when encountering the long suffix on numbers.
• Add support for disabling a checker, by specifying an ’enabled’ attribute on the checker class.
• Add a new CLI option, –py3k, for enabling Python 3 porting mode. This mode will disable all other checkers
and will emit warnings and errors for constructs which are invalid or removed in Python 3.
• Add ’old-octal-literal’ to Python 3 porting checker, emitted when encountering octals with the old syntax.
• Add ’implicit-map-evaluation’ to Python 3 porting checker, emitted when encountering the use of map builtin,
without explicit evaluation.

10.10.33 What’s New in Pylint 1.3.0?

Release date: 2014-07-26

• Allow hanging continued indentation for implicitly concatenated strings. Closes issue #232.
• Pylint works under Python 2.5 again, and its test suite passes.
• Fix some false positives for the cellvar-from-loop warnings. Closes issue #233.
• Return new astroid class nodes when the inferencer can detect that that result of a function invocation on a type
(like type or abc.ABCMeta) is requested. Closes #205.
• Emit ’undefined-variable’ for undefined names when using the Python 3 metaclass= argument.
• Checkers respect priority now. Close issue #229.
• Fix a false positive regarding W0511. Closes issue #149.
• Fix unused-import false positive with Python 3 metaclasses (#143).
• Don’t warn with ’bad-format-character’ when encountering the ’a’ format on Python 3.
• Add multiple checks for PEP 3101 advanced string formatting: ’bad-format-string’, ’missing-format-
argument-key’, ’unused-format-string-argument’, ’format-combined-specification’, ’missing-format-attribute’
and ’invalid-format-index’.
• Issue broad-except and bare-except even if the number of except handlers is different than 1. Fixes issue #113.
• Issue attribute-defined-outside-init for all cases, not just for the last assignment. Closes issue #262.
• Emit ’not-callable’ when calling properties. Closes issue #268.
• Fix a false positive with unbalanced iterable unpacking, when encountering starred nodes. Closes issue #273.
• Add new checks, ’invalid-slice-index’ and ’invalid-sequence-index’ for invalid sequence and slice indices.
• Add ’assigning-non-slot’ warning, which detects assignments to attributes not defined in slots.
• Don’t emit ’no-name-in-module’ for ignored modules. Closes issue #223.
• Fix an ’unused-variable’ false positive, where the variable is assigned through an import. Closes issue #196.
• Definition order is considered for classes, function arguments and annotations. Closes issue #257.
• Don’t emit ’unused-variable’ when assigning to a nonlocal. Closes issue #275.

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• Do not let ImportError propagate from the import checker, leading to crash in some namespace package related
cases. Closes issue #203.
• Don’t emit ’pointless-string-statement’ for attribute docstrings. Closes issue #193.
• Use the proper mode for pickle when opening and writing the stats file. Closes issue #148.
• Don’t emit hidden-method message when the attribute has been monkey-patched, you’re on your own when you
do that.
• Only emit attribute-defined-outside-init for definition within the same module as the offended class, avoiding to
mangle the output in some cases.
• Don’t emit ’unnecessary-lambda’ if the body of the lambda call contains call chaining. Closes issue #243.
• Don’t emit ’missing-docstring’ when the actual docstring uses .format. Closes issue #281.

10.10.34 What’s New in Pylint 1.2.1?

Release date: 2014-04-30

• Restore the ability to specify the init-hook option via the configuration file, which was accidentally broken in
1.2.0.
• Add a new warning [bad-continuation] for badly indentend continued lines.
• Emit [assignment-from-none] when the function contains bare returns. Fixes BitBucket issue #191.
• Added a new warning for closing over variables that are defined in loops. Fixes Bitbucket issue #176.
• Do not warn about u escapes in string literals when Unicode literals are used for Python 2.*. Fixes BitBucket
issue #151.
• Extend the checking for unbalanced-tuple-unpacking and unpacking-non-sequence to instance attribute unpack-
ing as well.
• Fix explicit checking of python script (1.2 regression, #219)
• Restore –init-hook, renamed accidentally into –init-hooks in 1.2.0 (#211)
• Add ’indexing-exception’ warning, which detects that indexing an exception occurs in Python 2 (behaviour
removed in Python 3).

10.10.35 What’s New in Pylint 1.2.0?

Release date: 2014-04-18

• Pass the current python paths to pylint process when invoked via epylint. Fixes BitBucket issue #133.
• Add -i / –include-ids and -s / –symbols back as completely ignored options. Fixes BitBucket issue #180.
• Extend the number of cases in which logging calls are detected. Fixes bitbucket issue #182.
• Improve pragma handling to not detect pylint:* strings in non-comments. Fixes BitBucket issue #79.
• Do not crash with UnknownMessage if an unknown message ID/name appears in disable or enable in the con-
figuration. Patch by Cole Robinson. Fixes bitbucket issue #170.
• Add new warning ’eval-used’, checking that the builtin function eval was used.
• Make it possible to show a naming hint for invalid name by setting include-naming-hint. Also make the naming
hints configurable. Fixes BitBucket issue #138.

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• Added support for enforcing multiple, but consistent name styles for different name types inside a single module;
based on a patch written by [email protected].
• Also warn about empty docstrings on overridden methods; contributed by [email protected].
• Also inspect arguments to constructor calls, and emit relevant warnings; contributed by [email protected].
• Added a new configuration option logging-modules to make the list of module names that can be checked for
’logging-not-lazy’ et. al. configurable; contributed by [email protected].
• ensure init-hooks is evaluated before other options, notably load-plugins (#166)
• Python 2.5 support restored: fixed small issues preventing pylint to run on python 2.5. Bitbucket issues #50 and
#62.
• bitbucket #128: pylint doesn’t crash when looking for used-before-assignment in context manager assignments.
• Add new warning, ’bad-reversed-sequence’, for checking that the reversed() builtin receive a sequence (im-
plements __getitem__ and __len__, without being a dict or a dict subclass) or an instance which implements
__reversed__.
• Mark file as a bad function when using python2 (closes #8).
• Add new warning ’bad-exception-context’, checking that raise ... from ... uses a proper exception context (None
or an exception).
• Enhance the check for ’used-before-assignment’ to look for ’nonlocal’ uses.
• Emit ’undefined-all-variable’ if a package’s __all__ variable contains a missing submodule (closes #126).
• Add a new warning ’abstract-class-instantiated’ for checking that abstract classes created with abc module and
with abstract methods are instantied.
• Do not warn about ’return-arg-in-generator’ in Python 3.3+.
• Do not warn about ’abstract-method’ when the abstract method is implemented through assignment (#155).
• Improve cyclic import detection in the case of packages, patch by Buck Golemon
• Add new warnings for checking proper class __slots__: invalid-slots-object and invalid-slots.
• Search for rc file in ~/.config/pylintrc if ~/.pylintrc doesn’t exists (#121)
• Don’t register the newstyle checker w/ python >= 3
• Fix unused-import false positive w/ augment assignment (#78)
• Fix access-member-before-definition false negative wrt aug assign (#164)
• Do not attempt to analyze non python file, eg .so file (#122)

10.10.36 What’s New in Pylint 1.1.0?

Release date: 2013-12-22

• Add new check for use of deprecated pragma directives "pylint:disable-msg" or "pylint:enable-msg" (I0022,
deprecated-pragma) which was previously emitted as a regular warn().
• Avoid false used-before-assignment for except handler defined identifier used on the same line (#111).
• Combine ’no-space-after-operator’, ’no-space-after-comma’ and ’no-space-before-operator’ into a new warning
’bad-whitespace’.
• Add a new warning ’superfluous-parens’ for unnecessary parentheses after certain keywords.
• Fix a potential crash in the redefine-in-handler warning if the redefined name is a nested getattr node.

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• Add a new option for the multi-statement warning to allow single-line if statements.
• Add ’bad-context-manager’ error, checking that ’__exit__’ special method accepts the right number of argu-
ments.
• Run pylint as a python module ’python -m pylint’ (anatoly techtonik).
• Check for non-exception classes inside an except clause.
• epylint support options to give to pylint after the file to analyze and have basic input validation (bitbucket #53
and #54), patches provided by felipeochoa and Brian Lane.
• Added a new warning, ’non-iterator-returned’, for non-iterators returned by ’__iter__’.
• Add new checks for unpacking non-sequences in assignments (unpacking-non-sequence) as well as unbalanced
tuple unpacking (unbalanced-tuple-unpacking).
• useless-else-on-loop not emitted if there is a break in the else clause of inner loop (#117).
• don’t mark input as a bad function when using python3 (#110).
• badly-implemented-container caused several problems in its current implementation. Deactivate it until we have
something better. See #112 for instance.
• Use attribute regexp for properties in python3, as in python2
• Create the PYLINTHOME directory when needed, it might fail and lead to spurious warnings on import of
pylint.config.
• Fix setup.py so that pylint properly install on Windows when using python3
• Various documentation fixes and enhancements
• Fix issue #55 (false-positive trailing-whitespace on Windows)

10.10.37 What’s New in Pylint 1.0.0?

Release date: 2013-08-06

• Add check for the use of ’exec’ function
• New –msg-template option to control output, deprecating "msvc" and "parseable" output formats as well as
killing –include-ids and –symbols options
• Do not emit [fixme] for every line if the config value ’notes’ is empty, but [fixme] is enabled.
• Emit warnings about lines exceeding the column limit when those lines are inside multiline docstrings.
• Do not double-check parameter names with the regex for parameters and inline variables.
• Added a new warning missing-final-newline (C0304) for files missing the final newline.
• Methods that are decorated as properties are now treated as attributes for the purposes of name checking.
• Names of derived instance class member are not checked any more.
• Names in global statements are now checked against the regular expression for constants.
• For toplevel name assignment, the class name regex will be used if pylint can detect that value on the right-hand
side is a class (like collections.namedtuple()).
• Simplified invalid-name message
• Added a new warning invalid-encoded-data (W0512) for files that contain data that cannot be decoded with the
specified or default encoding.

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• New warning bad-open-mode (W1501) for calls to open (or file) that specify invalid open modes (Original
implementation by Sasha Issayev).
• New warning old-style-class (C1001) for classes that do not have any base class.
• Add new name type ’class_attribute’ for attributes defined in class scope. By default, allow both const and
variable names.
• New warning trailing-whitespace (C0303) that warns about trailing whitespace.
• Added a new warning unpacking-in-except (W0712) about unpacking exceptions in handlers, which is unsup-
ported in Python 3.
• Add a configuration option for missing-docstring to optionally exempt short functions/methods/classes from the
check.
• Add the type of the offending node to missing-docstring and empty-docstring.
• New utility classes for per-checker unittests in testutils.py
• Do not warn about redefinitions of variables that match the dummy regex.
• Do not treat all variables starting with _ as dummy variables, only _ itself.
• Make the line-too-long warning configurable by adding a regex for lines for with the length limit should not be
enforced
• Do not warn about a long line if a pylint disable option brings it above the length limit
• Do not flag names in nested with statements as undefined.
• Added a new warning ’old-raise-syntax’ for the deprecated syntax raise Exception, args
• Support for PEP 3102 and new missing-kwoa (E1125) message for missing mandatory keyword argument (logi-
lab.org’s #107788)
• Fix spelling of max-branchs option, now max-branches
• Added a new base class and interface for checkers that work on the tokens rather than the syntax, and only
tokenize the input file once.
• Follow astng renaming to astroid
• bitbucket #37: check for unbalanced unpacking in assignments
• bitbucket #25: fix incomplete-protocol false positive for read-only containers like tuple
• bitbucket #16: fix False positive E1003 on Python 3 for argument-less super()
• bitbucket #6: put back documentation in source distribution
• bitbucket #15: epylint shouldn’t hang anymore when there is a large output on pylint’stderr
• bitbucket #7: fix epylint w/ python3
• bitbucket #3: remove string module from the default list of deprecated modules

10.10.38 What’s New in Pylint 0.28.0?

Release date: 2013-04-25

• bitbucket #1: fix "dictionary changed size during iteration" crash
• #74013: new E1310[bad-str-strip-call] message warning when a call to a {l,r,}strip method contains duplicate
characters (patch by Torsten Marek)
• #123233: new E0108[duplicate-argument-name] message reporting duplicate argument names

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• #81378: emit W0120[useless-else-on-loop] for loops without break

• #124660: internal dependencies should not appear in external dependencies report
• #124662: fix name error causing crash when symbols are included in output messages
• #123285: apply pragmas for warnings attached to lines to physical source code lines
• #123259: do not emit E0105 for yield expressions inside lambdas
• #123892: don’t crash when attempting to show source code line that can’t be encoded with the current locale
settings
• Simplify checks for dangerous default values by unifying tests for all different mutable compound literals.
• Improve the description for E1124[redundant-keyword-arg]

10.10.39 What’s New in Pylint 0.27.0?

Release date: 2013-02-26

• #20693: replace pylint.el by Ian Eure version (patch by J.Kotta)
• #105327: add support for –disable=all option and deprecate the ’disable-all’ inline directive in favour of ’skip-
file’ (patch by A.Fayolle)
• #110840: add messages I0020 and I0021 for reporting of suppressed messages and useless suppression pragmas.
(patch by Torsten Marek)
• #112728: add warning E0604 for non-string objects in __all__ (patch by Torsten Marek)
• #120657: add warning W0110/deprecated-lambda when a map/filter of a lambda could be a comprehension
(patch by Martin Pool)
• #113231: logging checker now looks at instances of Logger classes in addition to the base logging module.
(patch by Mike Bryant)
• #111799: don’t warn about octal escape sequence, but warn about o which is not octal in Python (patch by
Martin Pool)
• #110839: bind <F5> to Run button in pylint-gui
• #115580: fix erroneous W0212 (access to protected member) on super call (patch by Martin Pool)
• #110853: fix a crash when an __init__ method in a base class has been created by assignment rather than direct
function definition (patch by Torsten Marek)
• #110838: fix pylint-gui crash when include-ids is activated (patch by Omega Weapon)
• #112667: fix emission of reimport warnings for mixed imports and extend the testcase (patch by Torsten Marek)
• #112698: fix crash related to non-inferable __all__ attributes and invalid __all__ contents (patch by Torsten
Marek)
• Python 3 related fixes:
• #110213: fix import of checkers broken with python 3.3, causing "No such message id W0704" breakage
• #120635: redefine cmp function used in pylint.reporters
• Include full warning id for I0020 and I0021 and make sure to flush warnings after each module, not at the end
of the pylint run. (patch by Torsten Marek)
• Changed the regular expression for inline options so that it must be preceded by a # (patch by Torsten Marek)

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• Make dot output for import graph predictable and not depend on ordering of strings in hashes. (patch by Torsten
Marek)
• Add hooks for import path setup and move pylint’s sys.path modifications into them. (patch by Torsten Marek)

10.10.40 What’s New in Pylint 0.26.0?

Release date: 2012-10-05

• #106534: add –ignore-imports option to code similarity checking and ’symilar’ command line tool (patch by
Ry4an Brase)
• #104571: check for anomalous backslash escape, introducing new W1401 and W1402 messages (patch by
Martin Pool)
• #100707: check for boolop being used as exception class, introducing new W0711 message (patch by Tim
Hatch)
• #4014: improve checking of metaclass methods first args, introducing new C0204 message (patch by lothiral-
[email protected] finalized by sthenault)
• #4685: check for consistency of a module’s __all__ variable, introducing new E0603 message
• #105337: allow custom reporter in output-format (patch by Kevin Jing Qiu)
• #104420: check for protocol completness and avoid false R0903 (patch by Peter Hammond)
• #100654: fix grammatical error for W0332 message (using ’l’ as long int identifier)
• #103656: fix W0231 false positive for missing call to object.__init__ (patch by [email protected])
• #63424: fix similarity report disabling by properly renaming it to RP0801
• #103949: create a console_scripts entry point to be used by easy_install, buildout and pip
• fix cross-interpreter issue (non compatible access to __builtins__)
• stop including tests files in distribution, they causes crash when installed with python3 (#72022, #82417,
#76910)

10.10.41 What’s New in Pylint 0.25.2?

Release date: 2012-07-17

• #93591: Correctly emit warnings about clobbered variable names when an except handler contains a tuple of
names instead of a single name. (patch by [email protected])
• #7394: W0212 (access to protected member) not emitted on assigments (patch by [email protected])
• #18772; no prototype consistency check for mangled methods (patch by [email protected])
• #92911: emit W0102 when sets are used as default arguments in functions (patch by [email protected])
• #77982: do not emit E0602 for loop variables of comprehensions used as argument values inside a decorator
(patch by [email protected])
• #89092: don’t emit E0202 (attribute hiding a method) on @property methods
• #92584: fix pylint-gui crash due to internal API change
• #87192: fix crash when decorators are accessed through more than one dot (for instance @a.b is fine, @a.b.c
crash)
• #88914: fix parsing of –generated-members options, leading to crash when using a regexp value set

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• fix potential crashes with utils.safe_infer raising InferenceError

10.10.42 What’s New in Pylint 0.25.1?

Release date: 2011-12-08

• #81078: Warn if names in exception handlers clobber overwrite existing names (patch by [email protected])
• #81113: Fix W0702 messages appearing with the wrong line number. (patch by [email protected])
• #50461, #52020, #51222: Do not issue warnings when using 2.6’s property.setter/deleter functionality (patch
by [email protected])
• #9188, #4024: Do not trigger W0631 if a loop variable is assigned in the else branch of a for loop.

10.10.43 What’s New in Pylint 0.25.0?

Release date: 2011-10-7

• #74742: make allowed name for first argument of class method configurable (patch by Google)
• #74087: handle case where inference of a module return YES; this avoid some cases of "TypeError: ’_Yes’
object does not support indexing" (patch by Google)
• #74745: make "too general" exception names configurable (patch by Google)
• #74747: crash occurs when lookup up a special attribute in class scope (patch by google)
• #76920: crash if on eg "pylint –rcfile" (patch by Torsten Marek)
• #77237: warning for E0202 may be very misleading
• #73941: HTML report messages table is badly rendered

10.10.44 What’s New in Pylint 0.24.0?

Release date: 2011-07-18

• #69738: add regular expressions support for "generated-members"
• ids of logging and string_format checkers have been changed: logging: 65 -> 12, string_format: 99 -> 13 Also
add documentation to say that ids of range 1-50 shall be reserved to pylint internal checkers
• #69993: Additional string format checks for logging module: check for missing arguments, too many arguments,
or invalid string formats in the logging checker module. Contributed by Daniel Arena
• #69220: add column offset to the reports. If you’ve a custom reporter, this change may break it has now location
gain a new item giving the column offset.
• #60828: Fix false positive in reimport check
• #70495: absolute imports fail depending on module path (patch by Jacek Konieczny)
• #22273: Fix –ignore option documentation to match reality

10.10. Pylint’s ChangeLog 163

Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

10.10.45 What’s New in Pylint 0.23.0?

Release date: 2011-01-11

• documentation update, add manpages
• several performance improvements
• finalize python3 support
• new W0106 warning ’Expression "%s" is assigned to nothing’
• drop E0501 and E0502 messages about wrong source encoding: not anymore interesting since it’s a syntax error
for python >= 2.5 and we now only support this python version and above.
• don’t emit W0221 or W0222 when methods as variable arguments (eg *arg and/or **args). Patch submitted by
Charles Duffy.

10.10.46 What’s New in Pylint 0.22.0?

Release date: 2010-11-15

• python versions: minimal python3.x support; drop python < 2.5 support

10.10.47 What’s New in Pylint 0.21.4?

Release date: 2010-10-27

• fix #48066: pylint crashes when redirecting output containing non-ascii characters
• fix #19799: "pylint -blah" exit with status 2
• update documentation

10.10.48 What’s New in Pylint 0.21.3?

Release date: 2010-09-28

• restored python 2.3 compatibility. Along with logilab-astng 0.21.3 and logilab-common 0.52, this will much
probably be the latest release supporting python < 2.5.

10.10.49 What’s New in Pylint 0.21.2?

Release date: 2010-08-26

• fix #36193: import checker raise exception on cyclic import
• fix #28796: regression in –generated-members introduced pylint 0.20
• some documentation cleanups

10.10.50 What’s New in Pylint 0.21.1?

Release date: 2010-06-04

• fix #28962: pylint crash with new options, due to missing stats data while writing the Statistics by types report
• updated man page to 0.21 or greater command line usage (fix debian #582494)

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10.10.51 What’s New in Pylint 0.21.0?

Release date: 2010-05-11

• command line updated (closes #9774, #9787, #9992, #22962):
• all enable-* / disable-* options have been merged into –enable / –disable
• BACKWARD INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: short name of –errors-only becomes -E, -e being affected to –
enable
• pylint –help output much simplified, with –long-help available to get the complete one
• revisited gui, thanks to students from Toronto university (they are great contributors to this release!)
• fix #21591: html reporter produces no output if reports is set to ’no’
• fix #4581: not Missing docstring (C0111) warning if a method is overridden
• fix #4683: Non-ASCII characters count double if utf8 encode
• fix #9018: when using defining-attr-method, method order matters
• fix #4595: Comma not followed by a space should not occurs on trailing comma in list/tuple/dict definition
• fix #22585: [Patch] fix man warnings for pyreverse.1 manpage
• fix #20067: AttributeError: ’NoneType’ object has no attribute ’name’ with with

10.10.52 What’s New in Pylint 0.20.0?

Release date: 2010-03-01

• fix #19498: fix windows batch file
• fix #19339: pylint.el : non existing py-mod-map (closes Debian Bug report logs - #475939)
• implement #18860, new W0199 message on assert (a, b)
• implement #9776, ’W0150’ break or return statement in finally block may swallow exception.
• fix #9263, __init__ and __new__ are checked for unused arguments
• fix #20991, class scope definitions ignored in a genexpr
• fix #5975, Abstract intermediate class not recognized as such
• fix #5977, yield and return statement have their own counters, no more R0911 (Too many return statements)
when a function have many yield stamtements
• implement #5564, function / method arguments with leading "_" are ignored in arguments / local variables
count.
• implement #9982, E0711 specific error message when raising NotImplemented
• remove –cache-size option

10.10.53 What’s New in Pylint 0.19.0?

Release date: 2009-12-18

• implement #18947, #5561: checker for function arguments
• include James Lingard string format checker

10.10. Pylint’s ChangeLog 165

Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• include simple message (ids) listing by Vincent Ferotin (#9791)

• –errors-only does not hide fatal error anymore
• include james Lingard patches for ++/– and duplicate key in dicts
• include James Lingard patches for function call arguments checker
• improved flymake code and doc provided by Derek Harland
• refactor and fix the imports checker
• fix #18862: E0601 false positive with lambda functions
• fix #8764: More than one statement on a single line false positive with try/except/finally
• fix #9215: false undefined variable error in lambda function
• fix for w0108 false positive (Nathaniel)
• fix test/fulltest.sh
• #5821 added a utility function to run pylint in another process (patch provide by Vincent Ferotin)

10.10.54 What’s New in Pylint 0.18.0?

Release date: 2009-03-25

• tests ok with python 2.4, 2.5, 2.6. 2.3 not tested
• fix #8687, W0613 false positive on inner function
• fix #8350, C0322 false positive on multi-line string
• fix #8332: set E0501 line no to the first line where non ascii character has been found
• avoid some E0203 / E0602 false negatives by detecting respectively AttributeError / NameError
• implements #4037: don’t issue W0142 (* or ** magic) when they are barely passed from /* arguments
• complete #5573: more complete list of special methods, also skip W0613 for python internal method
• don’t show information messages by default
• integration of Yuen Ho Wong’s patches on emacs lisp files

10.10.55 What’s New in Pylint 0.17.0?

Release date: 2009-03-19

• semicolon check : move W0601 to W0301
• remove rpython : remove all rpython checker, modules and tests
• astng 0.18 compatibility: support for _ast module modifies interfaces

10.10.56 What’s New in Pylint 0.16.0?

Release date: 2009-01-28

• change [en|dis]able-msg-cat options: only accept message categories identified by their first letter (eg IRCWEF)
without the need for comma as separator
• add epylint.bat script to fix Windows installation

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• setuptools/easy_install support
• include a modified version of Maarten ter Huurne patch to avoid W0613 warning on arguments from overridden
method
• implement #5575 drop dumb W0704 message) by adding W0704 to ignored messages by default
• new W0108 message, checking for suspicious lambda (provided by Nathaniel Manista)
• fix W0631, false positive reported by Paul Hachmann
• fix #6951: false positive with W0104
• fix #6949
• patches by Mads Kiilerich:
• implement #4691, make pylint exits with a non zero return status if any messages other then Information are
issued
• fix #3711, #5626 (name resolution bug w/ decorator and class members)
• fix #6954

10.10.57 What’s New in Pylint 0.15.2?

Release date: 2008-10-13

• fix #5672: W0706 weirdness ( W0706 removed )
• fix #5998: documentation points to wrong url for mailing list
• fix #6022: no error message on wrong module names
• fix #6040: pytest doesn’t run test/func_test.py

10.10.58 What’s New in Pylint 0.15.1?

Release date: 2008-09-15

• fix #4910: default values are missing in manpage
• fix #5991: missing files in 0.15.0 tarball
• fix #5993: epylint should work with python 2.3

10.10.59 What’s New in Pylint 0.15.0?

Release date: 2008-09-10

• include pyreverse package and class diagram generation
• included Stefan Rank’s patch to deal with 2.4 relative import
• included Robert Kirkpatrick’s tutorial and typos fixes
• fix bug in reenabling message
• fix #2473: invoking pylint on __init__.py (hopefully)
• typecheck: acquired-members option has been dropped in favor of the more generic generated-members option.
If the zope option is set, the behaviour is now to add some default values to generated-members.

10.10. Pylint’s ChangeLog 167

Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• flymake integration: added bin/epylint and elisp/pylint-flymake.el

10.10.60 What’s New in Pylint 0.14.0?

Release date: 2008-01-14

• fix #3733: Messages (dis)appear depending on order of file names
• fix #4026: pylint.el should require compile
• fix a bug in colorized reporter, spotted by Dave Borowitz
• applied patch from Stefan Rank to avoid W0410 false positive when multiple "from __future__" import state-
ments
• implement #4012: flag back tick as deprecated (new W0333 message)
• new ignored-class option on typecheck checker allowing to skip members checking based on class name (patch
provided by Thomas W Barr)

10.10.61 What’s New in Pylint 0.13.2?

Release date: 2007-06-07

• fix disable-checker option so that it won’t accidentally enable the rpython checker which is disabled by default
• added note about the gedit plugin into documentation

10.10.62 What’s New in Pylint 0.13.1?

Release date: 2007-03-02

• fix some unexplained 0.13.0 packaging issue which led to a bunch of files missing from the distribution

10.10.63 What’s New in Pylint 0.13.0?

Release date: 2007-02-28

• new RPython (Restricted Python) checker for PyPy fellow or people wanting to get a compiled version of their
python program using the translator of the PyPy project. For more information about PyPy or RPython, visit
http://codespeak.net/pypy/
• new E0104 and E0105 messages introduced to respectively warn about "return" and "yield" outside function or
method
• new E0106 message when "yield" and "return something" are mixed in a function or method
• new W0107 message for unnecessary pass statement
• new W0614 message to differentiate between unused import X and unused from X import * (#3209, patch
submitted by Daniel Drake)
• included Daniel Drake’s patch to have a different message E1003 instead of E1001 when a missing member is
found but an inference failure has been detected
• msvs reporter for Visual Studio line number reporting (#3285)
• allow disable-all option inline (#3218, patch submitted by Daniel Drake)

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• –init-hook option to call arbitrary code necessary to set environment (eg sys.path) (#3156)
• One more Daniel’s patch fixing a command line option parsing problem, this’ll definitely be the DDrake release
:)
• fix #3184: crashes on "return" outside function
• fix #3205: W0704 false positive
• fix #3123: W0212 false positive on static method
• fix #2485: W0222 false positive
• fix #3259: when a message is explicitly enabled, check the checker emitting it is enabled

10.10.64 What’s New in Pylint 0.12.2?

Release date: 2006-11-23

• fix #3143: W0233 bug w/ YES objects
• fix #3119: Off-by-one error counting lines in a file
• fix #3117: ease sys.stdout overriding for reporters
• fix #2508: E0601 false positive with lambda
• fix #3125: E1101 false positive and a message duplication. Only the last part is actually fixed since the initial
false positive is due to dynamic setting of attributes on the decimal.Context class.
• fix #3149: E0101 false positives and introduced E0100 for generator __init__ methods
• fixed some format checker false positives

10.10.65 What’s New in Pylint 0.12.1?

Release date: 2006-09-25

• fixed python >= 2.4 format false positive with multiple lines statement
• fixed some 2.5 issues
• fixed generator expression scope bug (depends on astng 0.16.1)
• stop requiring __revision__

10.10.66 What’s New in Pylint 0.12.0?

Release date: 2006-08-10

• usability changes:
– parseable, html and color options are now handled by a single output-format option
– enable-<checkerid> and disable-all options are now handled by two (exclusive) enable-checker and
disable-checker options taking a comma separated list of checker names as value
– renamed debug-mode option to errors-only
• started a reference user manual
• new W0212 message for access to protected member from client code (close #14081)

10.10. Pylint’s ChangeLog 169

Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• new W0105 and W0106 messages extracted from W0104 (statement seems to have no effect) respectively when
the statement is actually string (that’s sometimes used instead of comments for documentation) or an empty
statement generated by a useless semicolon
• reclassified W0302 to C0302
• fix so that global messages are not anymore connected to the last analyzed module (close #10106)
• fix some bugs related to local disabling of messages
• fix cr/lf pb when generating the rc file on windows platforms

10.10.67 What’s New in Pylint 0.11.0?

Release date: 2006-04-19

• fix crash caused by the exceptions checker in some case
• fix some E1101 false positive with abstract method or classes defining __getattr__
• dirty fix to avoid "_socketobject" has not "connect" member. The actual problem is that astng isn’t able to
understand the code used to create socket.socket object with exec
• added an option in the similarity checker to ignore docstrings, enabled by default
• included patch from Benjamin Niemann to allow block level enabling/disabling of messages

10.10.68 What’s New in Pylint 0.10.0?

Release date: 2006-03-06

• WARNING, this release include some configuration changes (see below), so you may have to check and update
your own configuration file(s) if you use one
• this release require the 0.15 version of astng or superior (it will save you a lot of pylint crashes...)
• W0705 has been reclassified to E0701, and is now detecting more inheriting problem, and a false positive when
empty except clause is following an Exception catch has been fixed (close #10422)
• E0212 and E0214 (metaclass/class method should have mcs/cls as first argument have been reclassified to C0202
and C0203 since this not as well established as "self" for instance method (E0213)
• W0224 has been reclassified into F0220 (failed to resolve interfaces implemented by a class)
• a new typecheck checker, introducing the following checks:
– E1101, access to unexistent member (implements #10430), remove the need of E0201 and so some options
has been moved from the classes checker to this one
– E1102, calling a non callable object
– E1111 and W1111 when an assignment is done on a function call but the inferred function returns None
(implements #10431)
• change in the base checker:
– checks module level and instance attribute names (new const-rgx and attr-rgx configuration option) (im-
plements #10209 and #10440)
– list comprehension and generator expression variables have their own regular expression (the inlinevar-rgx
option) (implements #9146)

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– the C0101 check with its min-name-length option has been removed (this can be specified in the regxp
after all...)
– W0103 and W0121 are now handled by the variables checker (W0103 is now W0603 and W0604 has been
splitted into different messages)
– W0131 and W0132 messages have been reclassified to C0111 and C0112 respectively
– new W0104 message on statement without effect
• regexp support for dummy-variables (dummy-variables-rgx option replace dummy-variables) (implements
#10027)
• better global statement handling, see W0602, W0603, W0604 messages (implements #10344 and #10236)
• –debug-mode option, disabling all checkers without error message and filtering others to only display error
• fixed some R0201 (method could be a function) false positive

10.10.69 What’s New in Pylint 0.9.0?

Release date: 2006-01-10

• a lot of updates to follow astng 0.14 API changes, so install logilab-astng 0.14 or greater before using this
version of pylint
• checker number 10 ! newstyle will search for problems regarding old style / new style classes usage problems
(rely on astng 0.14 new style detection feature)
• new ’load-plugins’ options to load additional pylint plugins (usable from the command line or from a configu-
ration file) (implements #10031)
• check if a "pylintrc" file exists in the current working directory before using the one specified in the PYLINTRC
environment variable or the default ~/.pylintrc or /etc/pylintrc
• fixed W0706 (Identifier used to raise an exception is assigned...) false positive and reraising a catched exception
instance
• fixed E0611 (No name get in module blabla) false positive when accessing to a class’__dict__
• fixed some E0203 ("access to member before its definition") false positive
• fixed E0214 ("metaclass method first argument should be mcs) false positive with staticmethod used on a meta-
class
• fixed packaging which was missing the test/regrtest_data directory
• W0212 (method could be a function) has been reclassified in the REFACTOR category as R0201, and is no
more considerer when a method overrides an abstract method from an ancestor class
• include module name in W0401 (wildcard import), as suggested by Amaury
• when using the ’–parseable’, path are written relative to the current working directory if in a sub-directory of it
(#9789)
• ’pylint –version’ shows logilab-astng and logilab-common versions
• fixed pylint.el to handle space in file names
• misc lint style fixes

10.10. Pylint’s ChangeLog 171

Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

10.10.70 What’s New in Pylint 0.8.1?

Release date: 2005-11-07

• fix "deprecated module" false positive when the code imports a module whose name starts with a deprecated
module’s name (close #10061)
• fix "module has no name __dict__" false positive (close #10039)
• fix "access to undefined variable __path__" false positive (close #10065)
• fix "explicit return in __init__" false positive when return is actually in an inner function (close #10075)

10.10.71 What’s New in Pylint 0.8.0?

Release date: 2005-10-21

• check names imported from a module exists in the module (E0611), patch contributed by Amaury Forgeot d’Arc
• print a warning (W0212) for methods that could be a function (implements #9100)
• new –defining-attr-methods option on classes checker
• new –acquired-members option on the classes checker, used when –zope=yes to avoid false positive on acquired
attributes (listed using this new option) (close #8616)
• generate one E0602 for each use of an undefined variable (previously, only one for the first use but not for the
following) (implements #1000)
• make profile option saveable
• fix Windows .bat file, patch contributed by Amaury Forgeot d’Arc
• fix one more false positive for E0601 (access before definition) with for loop such as "for i in range(10): print i"
(test func_noerror_defined_and_used_on_same_line)
• fix false positive for E0201 (undefined member) when accessing to __name__ on a class object
• fix astng checkers traversal order
• fix bug in format checker when parsing a file from a platform using different new line characters (close #9239)
• fix encoding detection regexp
• fix –rcfile handling (support for –rcfile=file, close #9590)

10.10.72 What’s New in Pylint 0.7.0?

Release date: 2005-05-27

• WARNING: pylint is no longer a logilab subpackage. Users may have to manually remove the old logilab/pylint
directory.
• introduce a new –additional-builtins option to handle user defined builtins
• –reports option has now -r as short alias, and -i for –include-ids
• fix a bug in the variables checker which may causing some false positives when variables are defined and used
within the same statement (test func_noerror_defined_and_used_on_same_line)
• this time, real fix of the "disable-msg in the config file" problem, test added to unittest_lint
• fix bug with –list-messages and python -OO

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• fix possible false positive for W0201

10.10.73 What’s New in Pylint 0.6.4?

Release date: 2005-04-14

• allow to parse files without extension when a path is given on the command line (test noext)
• don’t fail if we are unable to read an inline option (e.g. inside a module), just produce an information message
(test func_i0010)
• new message E0103 for break or continue outside loop (close #8883, test func_continue_not_in_loop)
• fix bug in the variables checker, causing non detection of some actual name error (close #8884, test
func_nameerror_on_string_substitution)
• fix bug in the classes checker which was making pylint crash if "object" is assigned in a class inheriting from it
(test func_noerror_object_as_class_attribute)
• fix problem with the similar checker when related options are defined in a configuration file
• new –generate-man option to generate pylint’s man page (require the latest logilab.common (>= 0.9.3)
• packaged (generated...) man page

10.10.74 What’s New in Pylint 0.6.3?

Release date: 2005-02-24

• fix scope problem which may cause false positive and true negative on E0602
• fix problem with some options such as disable-msg causing error when they are coming from the configuration
file

10.10.75 What’s New in Pylint 0.6.2?

Release date: 2005-02-16

• fix false positive on E0201 ("access to undefined member") with metaclasses
• fix false positive on E0203 ("access to member before its definition") when attributes are defined in a parent
class
• fix false positive on W0706 ("identifier used to raise an exception assigned to...")
• fix interpretation of "t" as value for the indent-string configuration variable
• fix –rcfile so that –rcfile=pylintrc (only –rcfile pylintrc was working in earlier release)
• new raw checker example in the examples/ directory

10.10.76 What’s New in Pylint 0.6.1?

Release date: 2005-02-04

• new –rcfile option to specify the configuration file without the PYLINTRC environment variable
• added an example module for a custom pylint checker (see the example/ directory)

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Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• some fixes to handle fixes in common 0.9.1 (should however still working with common 0.9.0, even if upgrade
is recommended)

10.10.77 What’s New in Pylint 0.6.0?

Release date: 2005-01-20

• refix pylint emacs mode
• no more traceback when just typing "pylint"
• fix a bug which may cause crashes on resolving parent classes
• fix problems with the format checker: don’t chock on files containing multiple CR, avoid C0322, C0323, C0324
false positives with triple quoted string with quote inside
• correctly detect access to member defined latter in __init__ method
• now depends on common 0.8.1 to fix problem with interface resolution (close #8606)
• new –list-msgs option describing available checkers and their messages
• added windows specific documentation to the README file, contributed by Brian van den Broek
• updated doc/features.txt (actually this file is now generated using the –list-msgs option), more entries into the
FAQ
• improved tests coverage

10.10.78 What’s New in Pylint 0.5.0?

Release date: 2004-10-19

• avoid importing analyzed modules !
• new Refactor and Convention message categories. Some Warnings have been remaped into those new categories
• added "similar", a tool to find copied and pasted lines of code, both using a specific command line tool and
integrated as a pylint’s checker
• imports checker may report import dependencies as a dot graph
• new checker regrouping most Refactor detection (with some new metrics)
• more command line options storable in the configuration file
• fix bug with total / undocumented number of methods

10.10.79 What’s New in Pylint 0.4.2?

Release date: 2004-07-08

• fix pylint emacs mode
• fix classes checkers to handler twisted interfaces

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10.10.80 What’s New in Pylint 0.4.1?

Release date: 2004-05-14

• fix the setup.py script to allow bdist_winst (well, the generated installer has not been tested...) with the necessary
logilab/__init__.py file
• fix file naming convention as suggested by Andreas Amoroso
• fix stupid crash bug with bad method names

10.10.81 What’s New in Pylint 0.4.0?

Release date: 2004-05-10

• fix file path with –parsable
• –parsable option has been renamed to –parseable
• added patch from Andreas Amoroso to output message to files instead of standard output
• added Run to the list of correct variable names
• fix variable names regexp and checking of local classes names
• some basic handling of metaclasses
• no-docstring-rgx apply now on classes too
• new option to specify a different regexp for methods than for functions
• do not display the evaluation report when no statements has been analysed
• fixed crash with a class nested in a method
• fixed format checker to deals with triple quoted string and lines with code and comment mixed
• use logilab.common.ureports to layout reports

10.10.82 What’s New in Pylint 0.3.3?

Release date: 2004-02-17

• added a parsable text output, used when the –parsable option is provided
• added an emacs mode using this output, available in the distrib’s elisp directory
• fixed some typos in messages
• change include-ids options to yn, and allow it to be in the configuration file
• do not chock on corrupted stats files
• fixed bug in the format checker which may stop pylint execution
• provide scripts for unix and windows to wrap the minimal pylint tk gui

10.10.83 What’s New in Pylint 0.3.2?

Release date: 2003-12-23

• html-escape messages in the HTML reporter (bug reported by Juergen Hermann)

10.10. Pylint’s ChangeLog 175

Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• added "TODO" to the list of default note tags

• added "rexec" to the list of default deprecated modules
• fixed typos in some messages

10.10.84 What’s New in Pylint 0.3.1?

Release date: 2003-12-05

• bug fix in format and classes checkers
• remove print statement from imports checkers
• provide a simple tk gui, essentially useful for windows users

10.10.85 What’s New in Pylint 0.3.0?

Release date: 2003-11-20

• new exceptions checker, checking for string exception and empty except clauses.
• imports checker checks for reimport of modules
• classes checker checks for calls to ancestor’s __init__ and abstract method not overridden. It doesn’t complain
anymore for unused import in __init__ files, and provides a new option ignore-interface-methods, useful when
you’re using zope Interface implementation in your project
• base checker checks for black listed builtins call (controlled by the bad-functions option) and for use of * and
**
• format checker checks for use of <> and "l" as long int marker
• major internal API changes
• use the rewrite of astng, based on compiler.ast
• added unique id for messages, as suggested by Wolfgang Grafen
• added unique id for reports
• can take multiple modules or files as argument
• new options command line options : –disable-msg, –enable-msg, –help-msg, –include-ids, –reports, –disable-
report, –cache-size
• –version shows the version of the python interpreter
• removed some options which are now replaced by [en|dis]able-msg, or disable-report
• read disable-msg and enable-msg options in source files (should be in comments on the top of the file, in the
form "# pylint: disable-msg=W0402"
• new message for modules importing themselves instead of the "cyclic import" message
• fix bug with relative and cyclic imports
• fix bug in imports checker (cycle was not always detected)
• still fixes in format checker : don’t check comment and docstring, check first line after an indent
• black and white list now apply to all identifiers, not only variables, so changed the configuration option from
(good|bad)-variable-names to (good|bad)-names
• added string, rexec and Bastion to the default list of deprecated modules

176 Chapter 10. What’s New in Pylint

Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

• do not print redefinition warning for function/class/method defined in mutually exclusive branches

10.10.86 What’s New in Pylint 0.2.1?

Release date: 2003-10-10

• added some documentation, fixed some typos
• set environment variable PYLINT_IMPORT to 1 during pylint execution.
• check that variables "imported" using the global statement exist
• indentation problems are now warning instead of errors
• fix checkers.initialize to try to load all files with a known python extension (patch from wrobell)
• fix a bunch of messages
• fix sample configuration file
• fix the bad-construction option
• fix encoding checker
• fix format checker

10.10.87 What’s New in Pylint 0.2.0?

Release date: 2003-09-12

• new source encoding / FIXME checker (pep 263)
• new –zope option which trigger Zope import. Useful to check Zope products code.
• new –comment option which enable the evaluation note comment (disabled by default).
• a ton of bug fixes
• easy functional test infrastructure

10.10.88 What’s New in Pylint 0.1.2?

Release date: 2003-06-18

• bug fix release
• remove dependency to pyreverse

10.10.89 What’s New in Pylint 0.1.1?

Release date: 2003-06-01

• much more functionalities !

10.10.90 What’s New in Pylint 0.1?

Release date: 2003-05-19

• initial release

10.10. Pylint’s ChangeLog 177

Pylint Documentation, Release 2.4.4

178 Chapter 10. What’s New in Pylint

Index

Symbols -name-group=<name1:name2:...,...>
-argument-naming-style=<style> command line option, 21
command line option, 20 -variable-naming-style=<style>
-argument-rgx=<regex> command line option, 20
command line option, 20 -variable-rgx=<regex>
-attr-naming-style=<style> command line option, 20
command line option, 20
-attr-rgx=<regex> C
command line option, 20 command line option
-class-attribute-naming-style=<style> -argument-naming-style=<style>, 20
command line option, 20 -argument-rgx=<regex>, 20
-class-attribute-rgx=<regex> -attr-naming-style=<style>, 20
command line option, 20 -attr-rgx=<regex>, 20
-class-naming-style=<style> -class-attribute-naming-style=<style>,
command line option, 20 20
-class-rgx=<regex> -class-attribute-rgx=<regex>, 20
command line option, 20 -class-naming-style=<style>, 20
-const-naming-style=<style> -class-rgx=<regex>, 20
command line option, 20 -const-naming-style=<style>, 20
-const-rgx=<regex> -const-rgx=<regex>, 20
command line option, 20 -function-naming-style=<style>, 20
-function-naming-style=<style> -function-rgx=<regex>, 20
command line option, 20 -include-naming-hint=y|n, 21
-function-rgx=<regex> -inlinevar-naming-style=<style>, 20
command line option, 20 -inlinevar-rgx=<regex>, 20
-include-naming-hint=y|n -method-naming-style=<style>, 20
command line option, 21 -method-rgx=<regex>, 20
-inlinevar-naming-style=<style> -module-naming-style=<style>, 19
command line option, 20 -module-rgx=<regex>, 20
-inlinevar-rgx=<regex> -name-group=<name1:name2:...,...>,
command line option, 20 21
-method-naming-style=<style> -variable-naming-style=<style>, 20
command line option, 20 -variable-rgx=<regex>, 20
-method-rgx=<regex>
command line option, 20
-module-naming-style=<style>
command line option, 19
-module-rgx=<regex>
command line option, 20

179