Template language for random string generation

[cwolf.algo at gmail.com]

On Friday, August 8, 2014 10:35:12 AM UTC-4, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> One suggestion, though perhaps nothing actually needs changing.
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> 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.
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> Definitely a small point though.
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> Skip
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> 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.

Skip - try "lastpass.com" it's cross platform, include Win, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS.