Template language for random string generation

[Skip Montanaro]

One suggestion, though perhaps nothing actually needs changing.

I occasionally run into sites which define their password constraints as
something like "minimum 8 characters, at least one number, one uppercase
letter, and one special character." Their notion of "special" (which in my
mind means any printable character which isn't a letter, whitespace, or
digit) is only a subset.  You include a "/" or a ";" and they kick your
nice random password back at you, sometimes without telling you what you
actually did wrong, only repeating, "minimum 8 characters, at least one
number and one special character." You are left to discover through
trial-and-error which "special" characters are actually allowed. Once you
figure that out, I suppose you could use something like "[.-,()&@]" or
whatever is actually allowed, but it would be nice if perhaps there was a
way to figure out what some of these sites actually mean by "special"
characters and define a \-escape which represents the lowest common
denominator set of "special" characters.

Definitely a small point though.

Skip

P.S. Probably a topic for a separate thread, and not actually
Python-related, but on a related note, I have never found a free password
keeper which works on all my platforms (Mac, Android, Unix). That is one
stumbling block (for me) to actually using extremely strong passwords. If
you have some thoughts, please contact me off-list.
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