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.