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VFP MySQL String Connect Issue

Hi all.

I am using VFP 9 connecting to MySQL with the MySQL ODBC driver v3.51 and am having the following issue.

If a password to a database contains non-alphanumeric characters, for example a ';' or '[' the connection will fail. If I change the password to the db to just characters and numbers the connection succeeds.

Other programs that connect to the database can use the original password containing the special characters, so I know the issue lies within the VFP/ODBC connection.

I was just wondering if anyone else has experienced this and if there is a known workaround.

SOLUTION

Dave Baldwin

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Olaf Doschke

I wonder if this is just stated for MSSQL Server, but ; also is a seperator in connection strings to denote the end of one config section as in "server=localhost;db=test;..."

What you can try is putting a password with such chars in quotes:
lcConn="...;PWD='passwordwith;';..."

Bye, Olaf.

Dave Baldwin

The problem is with the ODBC interface, not the driver. You can look here http://www.connectionstrings.com/ and see that all of the ODBC connection strings use punctuation as delimiters in the connection strings.

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Olaf Doschke

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Dave Baldwin

I'm glad you tested that. I have never seen an example where quotes were used before.

formadmirer

ASKER

It seems to be very finicky, very hit and miss about what it will accept and not accept.
I created an account and tried these passwords, both with and without single quotes.

)ue.?h%5J?9Z
TW[?+*)@ZL3R

[]{}(),;?*!@123

The top two passwords were accepted both with and without quotes, even though they contain illegal characters.

The third password, Olaf's example, I could not get to work no matter what I did.

I think I'll just scan the passwords chosen for illegal chars and suggest they choose another.

thanks for all the help!

Olaf Doschke

Just notice, I checked this with an SQL Server. In regard to the article mentioned this should not work, especially with SQL Server. And in regard to David not with any ODBC driver.

The MySQL docs also don't mention allowed or disallowed chars, but you find somthing in the bugtracking list: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=52404

As you say other applications or clients can login the error has to be either the old ODBC version (we have ODBC 5.1.11) or it's even chars you can't write into an ANSI Codepage 1252 encode foxpro prg. If it's the latter, there are ways to convert eg unicode chars to their hex representation and generate the unicode string in FoxPro programmatically, instead of using a string literal for the connection string.

Bye, Olaf.