EDIT: this is wrong and implementation dependent - see comments.

Just have Python do its own check by making a dictionary with the variable holding the name as the key and splatting it as keyword arguments:

def _dummy_function(**kwargs):
    pass

def is_valid_variable_name(name):
    try:
        _dummy_function(**{name: None})
        return True
    except TypeError:
        return False

Notably, TypeError is consistently raised whenever a dict splats into keyword arguments but has a key which isn't a valid function argument, and whenever a dict literal is being constructed with an invalid key, so this will work correctly on anything you pass to it.

EDIT: As others have mentioned, pylint expects that global variables should be UPPERCASE. If the warnings really bother you, you can circumvent them by wrapping small snippets like this in a main()-function and then use the if __name__ == "__main__"-convention. Or if you care, you can modify the regular expressions that pylint uses to validate variable names.

From the developers of Pylint.

In this case Pylint is telling me that those variables appear to be constants and should be all UPPERCASE. This rule is in fact a naming convention that is specific to the folks at Logilab who created Pylint. That is the way they have chosen to name those variables. You too can create your own in-house naming conventions but for the purpose of this tutorial, we want to stick to the PEP-8 standard. In this case, the variables I declared should follow the convention of all lowercase. The appropriate rule would be something like: "should match [a-z_][a-z0-9_]{2,30}$". Notice the lowercase letters in the regular expression (a-z versus A-Z)

You can test it by running: pylint --const-rgx='[a-z_][a-z0-9_]{2,30}$' x.py