homepage

spwd uses -1 rather than '' for empty attributes. This is different from the behaviour in the pwd module, and makes it more difficult to generate a new, valid shadow entry.
In my opinion, simply doing a ':'.join(str(val) for val in rec) should result in a valid entry. With pwd this is currently possible. Not so with spwd.
pwd:
import pwd
rec = pwd.getpwnam('alex')
print ':'.join(str(val) for val in rec)
spwd:
import spwd
rec = spwd.getspnam('alex')
shdw = ''
for idx, val in enumerate(recs_shdw):
 if idx != 0:
 shdw += ':'
 if val != -1:
 shdw += str(val)
print shdw