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Thread tagged as: Error, Installation

MySQL Passwords with Semicolons

Hi,

Today we have noticed a problem with MySQL connections with passwords that contain a semicolon character. We used the generated password created in cPanel and it took a while for us to figure out that this was causing the problem. Looking at the connection code it makes sense that this would fail with a password such as abCDe;FG12@:

// PerchDB_Mysql.class.php Line 48
foreach($dsn_opts as $key=>$val) {
    $dsn .= "$key=$val;";
}

It's a rare occurrence, but there are no restrictions on characters for MySQL passwords so this problem could spring up again in the future.
James Wigger

James Wigger 0 points

  • 4 years ago
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

4 years ago

Yes, that would certainly fail. I can't actually find any information about correctly escaping a PDO DSN - I guess the expectation is that it's being hand entered.
James Wigger

James Wigger 0 points

4 years ago

Perch could possibly throw a warning if it can see a semicolon in the password, would help developers to track down the problem and simply create a new password if it's not something that's easily possible.

Thanks for checking it out!
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

4 years ago

Yes, I was thinking there could well be other characters that need escaping.
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

4 years ago

The password doesn't get concatenated into the DSN. The only parts that are added in that loop are:

  • host
  • database name
  • unix socket
  • connection port

The username and password are passed into the PDO constructor directly:

$this->link = new PDO($dsn, PERCH_DB_USERNAME, PERCH_DB_PASSWORD, $opts);

Was the password the only place the semicolon was appearing? What was the error you were getting?
James Wigger

James Wigger 0 points

4 years ago

I believe the password was the only place it was occurring.

Strange, I've tried to recreate it locally and cannot trigger any failing. So far

MySQL user: testing MySQL pass: password;test

Granted access to the database and the connection is fine. I'm thinking now that this may be something more to do with the server than Perch - possibly even cPanel is not capable of passing a semicolon through causing the problem. I'll investigate some more tomorrow back in the office to verify this as MAMP on my home mac isn't exactly a good comparison.