# 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.