This started as a bug report for httpie https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie/issues/717#issuecomment-426125261

And became a bug report for requests https://github.com/requests/requests/issues/4813

> But turned out to be an issue with Python's netrc parser:
> 
>
> it appears that auth via netrc is broken if ~/.netrc includes entries that are not exactly login/password tuples. For example, I have the following entries for circle ci and heroku:
>
> ```
>    machine api.heroku.com
>      login <redacted>
>      password <redacted>
>      method interactive
>    machine circleci.com
>      login <redacted>
> ```
>
> both of these entries prevent my entry for github.com from working with httpie (but curl works just fine).


I've used the following script to test python 2.7 and 3.7:

```
import netrc
import os.path

netrc.netrc(os.path.expanduser('~/.netrc')).authenticators('api.github.com')
```

Python 2:
```
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 4, in <module>
    netrc.netrc(os.path.expanduser('~/.netrc')).authenticators('api.github.com')
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/netrc.py", line 35, in __init__
    self._parse(file, fp, default_netrc)
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/python@2/2.7.15_1/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/netrc.py", line 117, in _parse
    file, lexer.lineno)
netrc.NetrcParseError: bad follower token 'method' (/Users/ian/.netrc, line 7)
````

Python 3:
```
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 4, in <module>
    netrc.netrc(os.path.expanduser('~/.netrc')).authenticators('api.github.com')
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.0/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/netrc.py", line 30, in __init__
    self._parse(file, fp, default_netrc)
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/3.7.0/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/netrc.py", line 111, in _parse
    file, lexer.lineno)
netrc.NetrcParseError: bad follower token 'method' (/Users/ian/.netrc, line 7)
```

Thanks for the report. There is no spec for .netrc files and the closest I can find is [0]. The error is present in master also. Could this be considered as an enhancement?

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/inetutils/manual/html_node/The-_002enetrc-file.html

Thanks

Yea, somehow, I suspected it was because there's no formal spec :)

I guess technically it's an enhancement, but given that configuration dictated by third-parties can break the environment, it does feel like a bug. 

For example, I can't use a python app to authenticate to github via netrc because of how heroku says I have to configure my netrc.

Also, there are probably two subtly different issues:
1. a machine with a password but no login breaks parsing
2. a machine with an unrecognized key breaks parsing

My PR https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/127 has tried to solve some restrictions of the current netrc library. It's somewhat outdated since no reviewer for a long time. As you can see there are also other libraries suffering from the restrictions.

Revising it I think it still doesn't solve the case here, although it should be easy. There is no formal spec we can refer to. :-( But since there is real world problem and curl allows it, we should take it into mind.

Emacs' netrc library supports some other keywords, namely 'port'. (This helps distinguish SMTP and IMAP auth information for the same machine.)

Documentation is here: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/auth/Help-for-users.html

Hellos, 

This issue is fixed via this PR[0] that is a continues from xiang.zhang work [1]

[0] https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/26330
[1] https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/127