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Because I did not want to expose my passwords in plain text whenever an exception was thrown or inside the debugger, I wrote this simple snippet. It's very simple, but can be quite useful nonetheless...

Python, 3 lines
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class passwd(str):
	def __repr__(self):
		return repr('*' * self.__len__())

To demonstrate its use, here some examples:

>>> astr = 'aString'
>>> astr
'aString'
>>> print astr
aString
>>> apwd = passwd('aPassword')
>>> apwd
'*********'
>>> apwd == 'aPassword'
True
>>> print apwd
aPassword

More important, the password string will not immediately show up in your debugger in plain text or in exception frames, since __repr__ is used for those cases.

3 comments

Gabriel Genellina 14 years, 6 months ago  # | flag

Nice! Although I'd write it as:

class passwd(str):
    def __repr__(self):
        return repr('*' * len(self))
david.gaarenstroom (author) 14 years, 6 months ago  # | flag

Yep, that's a better version. I'll be using that one myself from now on... Thanks!

niklas a 14 years, 4 months ago  # | flag

I like the simplicity of the code. Very useful. However I don't see why you have to reveal the length of your password. Why not use 8 * '*' for example.

Created by david.gaarenstroom on Tue, 15 Sep 2009 (MIT)
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