Accessing a protected member of a class or a module

Reports cases when a protected member is accessed outside the class, a descendant of the class where it is defined, or a module.

Example:

class Foo:
    def _protected_method(self):
        pass


class Bar(Foo):
    def public_method(self):
        self._protected_method()


foo = Foo()
foo._protected_method() # Access to a protected method

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

PyProtectedMember

Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | Python

Inspection ID: PyProtectedMemberInspection

Inspection options

Here you can find the description of settings available for the Accessing a protected member of a class or a module inspection, and the reference of their default values.

Ignore test functions

Option ID:

ignoreTestFunctions

Default value:

Selected

Ignore annotations

Option ID:

ignoreAnnotations

Default value:

Not selected

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection PyProtectedMember

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	CLion 2025.2, DataSpell 2025.2, IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2, PyCharm 2025.2, Qodana for JVM 2025.2,

Last modified: 18 September 2025