Telnet

Closes all open connections and empties the connection cache.

If multiple connections are opened, this keyword should be used in a test or suite teardown to make sure that all connections are closed. It is not an error if some of the connections have already been closed by Close Connection.

After this keyword, new indexes returned by Open Connection keyword are reset to 1.

Closes the current Telnet connection.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
loglevel		None

Remaining output in the connection is read, logged, and returned. It is not an error to close an already closed connection.

Use Close All Connections if you want to make sure all opened connections are closed.

See Logging section for more information about log levels.

Executes the given command and reads, logs, and returns everything until the prompt.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
command		null
loglevel		None
strip_prompt		False

This keyword requires the prompt to be configured either in importing or with Open Connection or Set Prompt keyword.

This is a convenience keyword that uses Write and Read Until Prompt internally. Following two examples are thus functionally identical:

${out} =

Execute Command

pwd

Write	pwd
${out} =	Read Until Prompt

See Logging section for more information about log levels and Read Until Prompt for more information about the strip_prompt parameter.

Logs in to the Telnet server with the given user information.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
username		null
password		null
login_prompt		login: \
password_prompt		Password: \
login_timeout		1 second
login_incorrect		Login incorrect

This keyword reads from the connection until the login_prompt is encountered and then types the given username. Then it reads until the password_prompt and types the given password. In both cases a newline is appended automatically and the connection specific timeout used when waiting for outputs.

How logging status is verified depends on whether a prompt is set for this connection or not:

1) If the prompt is set, this keyword reads the output until the prompt is found using the normal timeout. If no prompt is found, login is considered failed and also this keyword fails. Note that in this case both login_timeout and login_incorrect arguments are ignored.

2) If the prompt is not set, this keywords sleeps until login_timeout and then reads all the output available on the connection. If the output contains login_incorrect text, login is considered failed and also this keyword fails.

See Configuration section for more information about setting newline, timeout, and prompt.

Opens a new Telnet connection to the given host and port.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
host		null
alias		None
port		23
timeout		None
newline		None
prompt		None
prompt_is_regexp		False
encoding		None
encoding_errors		None
default_log_level		None
window_size		None
environ_user		None
terminal_emulation		None
terminal_type		None
telnetlib_log_level		None
connection_timeout		None

The timeout, newline, prompt, prompt_is_regexp, encoding, default_log_level, window_size, environ_user, terminal_emulation, terminal_type and telnetlib_log_level arguments get default values when the library is imported. Setting them here overrides those values for the opened connection. See Configuration, Terminal emulation and Logging sections for more information about these parameters and their possible values.

Possible already opened connections are cached and it is possible to switch back to them using Switch Connection keyword. It is possible to switch either using explicitly given alias or using index returned by this keyword. Indexing starts from 1 and is reset back to it by Close All Connections keyword.

Reads everything that is currently available in the output.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
loglevel		None

Read output is both returned and logged. See Logging section for more information about log levels.

Reads output until expected text is encountered.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
expected		null
loglevel		None

Text up to and including the match is returned and logged. If no match is found, this keyword fails. How much to wait for the output depends on the configured timeout.

See Logging section for more information about log levels. Use Read Until Regexp if more complex matching is needed.

Reads output until the prompt is encountered.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
loglevel		None
strip_prompt		False

This keyword requires the prompt to be configured either in importing or with Open Connection or Set Prompt keyword.

By default, text up to and including the prompt is returned and logged. If no prompt is found, this keyword fails. How much to wait for the output depends on the configured timeout.

If you want to exclude the prompt from the returned output, set strip_prompt to a true value (see Boolean arguments). If your prompt is a regular expression, make sure that the expression spans the whole prompt, because only the part of the output that matches the regular expression is stripped away.

See Logging section for more information about log levels.

Reads output until any of the expected regular expressions match.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
expected		null

This keyword accepts any number of regular expressions patterns or compiled Python regular expression objects as arguments. Text up to and including the first match to any of the regular expressions is returned and logged. If no match is found, this keyword fails. How much to wait for the output depends on the configured timeout.

If the last given argument is a valid log level, it is used as loglevel similarly as with Read Until keyword.

See the documentation of Python re module for more information about the supported regular expression syntax. Notice that possible backslashes need to be escaped in Robot Framework data.

Examples:

Read Until Regexp	(#|$)
Read Until Regexp	first_regexp	second_regexp
Read Until Regexp	\\d{4}-\\d{2}-\\d{2}	DEBUG

Sets the default log level used for logging in the current connection.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
level		null

The old default log level is returned and can be used to restore the log level later.

See Configuration section for more information about global and connection specific configuration.

Sets the encoding to use for writing and reading in the current connection.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
encoding		None
errors		None

The given encoding specifies the encoding to use when written/read text is encoded/decoded, and errors specifies the error handler to use if encoding/decoding fails. Either of these can be omitted and in that case the old value is not affected. Use string NONE to disable encoding altogether.

See Configuration section for more information about encoding and error handlers, as well as global and connection specific configuration in general.

The old values are returned and can be used to restore the encoding and the error handler later. See Set Prompt for a similar example.

If terminal emulation is used, the encoding can not be changed on an open connection.

Sets the newline used by Write keyword in the current connection.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
newline		null

The old newline is returned and can be used to restore the newline later. See Set Timeout for a similar example.

If terminal emulation is used, the newline can not be changed on an open connection.

See Configuration section for more information about global and connection specific configuration.

Sets the prompt used by Read Until Prompt and Login in the current connection.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
prompt		null
prompt_is_regexp		False

If prompt_is_regexp is given a true value (see Boolean arguments), the given prompt is considered to be a regular expression.

The old prompt is returned and can be used to restore the prompt later.

Examples

${prompt}	${regexp} =	Set Prompt	$
Do Something
Set Prompt	${prompt}	${regexp}

See the documentation of Python re module for more information about the supported regular expression syntax. Notice that possible backslashes need to be escaped in Robot Framework data.

See Configuration section for more information about global and connection specific configuration.

Sets the log level used for logging in the underlying telnetlib.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
level		null

Note that telnetlib can be very noisy thus using the level NONE can shutdown the messages generated by this library.

Sets the timeout used for waiting output in the current connection.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
timeout		null

Read operations that expect some output to appear (Read Until, Read Until Regexp, Read Until Prompt, Login) use this timeout and fail if the expected output does not appear before this timeout expires.

The timeout must be given in time string format. The old timeout is returned and can be used to restore the timeout later.

Examples

${old} =	Set Timeout	2 minute 30 seconds
Do Something
Set Timeout	${old}

See Configuration section for more information about global and connection specific configuration.

Switches between active connections using an index or an alias.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
index_or_alias		null

Aliases can be given to Open Connection keyword which also always returns the connection index.

This keyword returns the index of previous active connection.

Examples

Open Connection	myhost.net
Login	john	secret
Write	some command
Open Connection	yourhost.com	2nd conn
Login	root	password
Write	another cmd
${old index}=	Switch Connection	1	# index
Write	something
Switch Connection	2nd conn		# alias
Write	whatever
Switch Connection	${old index}		# back to original
[Teardown]	Close All Connections

The example above expects that there were no other open connections when opening the first one, because it used index 1 when switching to the connection later. If you are not sure about that, you can store the index into a variable as shown below.

${index} =	Open Connection	myhost.net
Do Something
Switch Connection	${index}

Writes the given text plus a newline into the connection.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
text		null
loglevel		None

The newline character sequence to use can be configured both globally and per connection basis. The default value is CRLF.

This keyword consumes the written text, until the added newline, from the output and logs and returns it. The given text itself must not contain newlines. Use Write Bare instead if either of these features causes a problem.

Note: This keyword does not return the possible output of the executed command. To get the output, one of the Read ... keywords must be used. See Writing and reading section for more details.

See Logging section for more information about log levels.

Writes the given text, and nothing else, into the connection.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
text		null

This keyword does not append a newline nor consume the written text. Use Write if these features are needed.

Writes the given control character into the connection.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
character		null

The control character is prepended with an IAC (interpret as command) character.

The following control character names are supported: BRK, IP, AO, AYT, EC, EL, NOP. Additionally, you can use arbitrary numbers to send any control character.

Examples

Write Control Character	BRK	# Send Break command
Write Control Character	241	# Send No operation command

Writes the given text repeatedly, until expected appears in the output.

Arguments

Argument	Type	Default value	Description
text		null
expected		null
timeout		null
retry_interval		null
loglevel		None

text is written without appending a newline and it is consumed from the output before trying to find expected. If expected does not appear in the output within timeout, this keyword fails.

retry_interval defines the time to wait expected to appear before writing the text again. Consuming the written text is subject to the normal configured timeout.

Both timeout and retry_interval must be given in time string format. See Logging section for more information about log levels.

Examples

Write Until Expected Output	ps -ef| grep myprocess\r\n	myprocess
...	5 s	0.5 s

The above example writes command ps -ef | grep myprocess\r\n until myprocess appears in the output. The command is written every 0.5 seconds and the keyword fails if myprocess does not appear in the output in 5 seconds.