Re: [gentoo-user] ftp login with ASCII characters?

[David Relson]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 07:21:43 +0000
Mick wrote:

> I am getting perplexed why WYSINWYG:
>
> I was trying to login to an ftp server from the CLI.  Typing in the
> passwd failed every time.  I then set it up as a network connection
> in Konqueror and I had no problem at all connecting using the same
> passwd.  However, I noticed that some additional characters had been
> added by konqueror's interpretation of what the passwd ought to look
> like; e.g.
>
> Original passwd:  XXXXXXX%02XXXX
> Konqueror passwd: XXXXXXX%2502XXXX
>
> Konqueror added 25 to it, after the percentage sign.  True enough
> when I tried the augmented string as a passwd on the command line I
> was able to login fine.  My terminal is TERM=rxvt and shell is
> SHELL=/bin/bash.  Is there a way to simplify this confusion and allow
> what I type to login normally? Otherwise, where can I find what
> characters I should be typing in for all sort of symbols like
> "^&*[]<>#@" ? --
> Regards,
> Mick

H'lo Mick,

It looks like your problem is the percent sign.  I suggest that you
don't use the percent sign in your password.  FWIW, most other special
characters should be fine.

In URL's, the percent sign is used as an escape character to indicate
the next 2 characters are hexadecimal digits representing a single
ascii character.  As you likely know, letter 'A' is a byte with value
65 (decimal) and 41 (hexadecimal).  In C (and other languages) it can
be represented as 0x41.  Using the percent sign escape notation, 'A'
and "%41" are the same.  Your password contains "%02" which is being
interpreted as 0x02, i.e. as the character whose internal value is 2,
i.e. as CTL-B.

An ASCII chart will give you the decimal and hexadecimal equivalents of
the special characters about which you asked.

HTH,

David