"Special characters not allowed" - and we eat only raw meat

[Richard Deeming]

Well, it stops those pesky SQL syntax errors without having to waste time learning about (and fixing) SQL injection. :rolleyes:

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"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer

[KarstenK]

somebody is using some piece of software which he never reviewed. X|

Press F1 for help or google it. Greetings from Germany

[megaadam]

ithinkwhitespaceisaspecialcharachterinsertsmiley

... such stuff as dreams are made on

[realJSOP]

Well, filenames can't have certain characters, so in some cases, telling the user that is okay, in my eyes.

".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013

[Foothill]

IMHO, there shouldn't be any restrictions on length or composition of a password if they are using proper security. It looks like they are either storing passwords as clear-text, which is incredibly bad, or they are encrypting the passwords in the database, which is also bad. If they used salted hashes, like they should, none of it would matter.

if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); } Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016

[CPallini]

I would limit you to the 26 letters and the ten digits. ;P

[TNCaver]

If you are naming a file, then it's understandable to check for those characters. But not in a username or password or plain text input field to be inserted into a file or database.

If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.

[Mycroft Holmes]

Wait, what, he was writing a product review, nothing to do with passwords.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH

[Duncan K G Campbell]

Maybe the developer had special needs... Anyway, what's so special about "special" characters? It's a phrase that's always got my back up. Is it just meant to be non-alphanumeric characters? These "special" characters are not so special when it comes to punctuation, etc!

[Kirill Illenseer]

Hey, it could be worse. I recently inherited a code base that won't even compile in release mode, only debug mode. And OFC it's using C's char type all over the place. Hey, the codebase is from 2016 mind you, so both Unicode and Unicode path names are a thing. And we're a German R&D office so umlauts are a thing as well. Ah, and the running code expects several support files RELATIVE TO THE WORKING DIRECTORY! In the meantime, I was able to toss that monstrosity. Do you want to guess what my successor did? He wrote a batch file to change to the proper folder and then launch the binary. Instead of fixing the source code to ignore the working directory. Ah, and this batch file bloody hell relies on an environmental variable to tell it where it lies itself. A part of this, I know for a fact, is to blame on both my predecessor's and my successor's deep hate for Windows and love for Linux (so they litereally couldn't give less of a damn how to makes things properly work on Windows), another part is simply "I don't want to learn anything new since I learned coding back in the 60s". And, I kid you not, this is but a slightly redacted quotation of the answer I received when trying to teach one of those guys ARC to pass a linked list between a part they're mainaining and the part that I was maintaining. And here we're back to where you started: Some people are just stuck in the 60s, or generally in the past. Learned coding back then, when 7-bit ASCII was the only way to go and simply couldn't care less about keeping up with the times. Even if keeping up with the tiems is but a matter of using ready constructs (like Unicode strings or c++'s list).

[Gary Wheeler]

YouMeanYouWouldNotLetHimEvenUseSpacesQuestionMark

Software Zen: delete this;

[CPallini]

YOUARENOTACCURATE

[Gary Wheeler]

YOUARERIGHTIMISSEDTHATISTHISBETTERYOUMEANYOUWOULDNOTLETHIMEVENUSESPACESQUESTIONMARK

Software Zen: delete this;

[Peter Shaw]

I have my own thoughts on this... Hold on a sec, I have a cold.... {cough, cough}Lazy Bastards{cough, cough} now where was I.... oh yes, well there we go :-)

[Daniel T Barnett]

I used to have an Amiga 1000 which allowed filenames to have special characters and even non-printable characters. It worked great. That computer was way ahead of its competitors.

[CPallini]

OK, that's good. It is exactly what I meant. Now, we old folks are allowed to use whatever characters we like. But him, 'The Youngster', should not be allowed to.

[Lost User]

It's easier to parse later with AI. (Take the lowest common denominator font; "alpha-numerics" only.) I think even Google at one time would stumble with "capitalized" versus "not".

"(I) am amazed to see myself here rather than there ... now rather than then". ― Blaise Pascal

[englebart]

1. Read this: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS\_(Cross\_Site\_Scripting)\_Prevention\_Cheat\_Sheet 2. Ponder your own code that reflects user input data (like comments) back to a web page. 3. Realize that disallowing ALL special characters makes the data in the DB very future proof. Points to consider: 1. Assume any input is trying to hack you 2. Don't trust that the data in your DB is really safe if a user entered it originally. e.g., Today you emit from DB -> HTML and everything is safe. Tomorrow you emit from DB -> JSON and a lurking time bomb blows up in your face as all of your customers start mining bitcoin for someone (not you). P.S. Consider becoming a vegetarian

[Dar Brett 0]

Password raise a scary thought. If they're rejecting special characters in a password it implies they're writing it straight into the database as plain text without hashing it.

[kalberts]

A very good observation. There is another argument (I am not saying that it is valid, though: I prefer to use passphrases, not passwords. Phrases have space in them. If you prefer to primarily work in a command line environment (read: You're a Linux guy), you want the password to be an argument on the call line, like -p passwd. Standard command line parsers want the argument value to be a single word, or you would have to quote it, and that is too cumbersome. You can go on from there: If the real -p argument starts with (/contains) a quoting charcter (there are several), a hyphen, a backslash, ... then it must be quoted in some suitable way, even if it consists of a single word. The method of quoting may depend on which special character(s) that makes quoting necessary. In a GUI, you don't have to be concerned about printable characters - they are all valid. Of course the encoding must be defined - trying to use an 8859-1 encoding of the key to decrypt a document which was encrypted with an UTF-8 encoding of the same key won't work. As long as you state that 7 bit ASCII "should be enough for everybody" (again: You are a Linux guy) different encodings is not an issue: ASCII is a subset of all 8859-variants and of UTF-8. So if you rule out non-ASCII characters to avoid encoding issues, and all those characters that is affected by command line parsing conventions, there isn't that much left beyond a-zA-Z0-9.