acceptable special characters in password

[websroger]

Are there special characters that are not recognised for a password in Joomla? I have a user that seems to have found one. Is there a list of acceptable special characters?

[ceford]

White space is not allowed. Can you tell us which character appears to be a problem?

[websroger]

Someone used an exclamation point and thought it was the reason his login failed. May have been another reason, but it raised the issue, and I'd like to know which are unacceptable. A search on Google gave a list, but I now one at least on that list does work.

[sozzled]

It's a good question (and I wish I had a good answer)

AFAIK passwords in J! 4.x must conform to the rules you define (see screenshot at https://docs.joomla.org/Help310:Compone ... rd_Options) but there's no specific restriction on what are defined as symbols.

AFAIK, symbols can include the following characters:

Code: Select all

~`[email protected]#$%^&*()_-+={[}]|\:;"'<,>.?/

In other words, an exclamation point is an allowed character. If you want to establish that an exclamation point is allowed (or not) try it yourself. I haven't tested an exclamation point on a J! 4.x website myself and I would be interested to learn what you discover. If an exclamation point is not allowed then I would suggest that the issue should be reported to the developers. In other words, I don't have a perfect answer to the question.

AFAIK, the only rule about passwords that may cause problems is if a space character is used at the beginning or the end of the password. On the other hand, I haven't tried it and what I've just written may simply be a piece of folklore.

[AMurray]

Under Joomla Users Configuration / Password options, it only lets you set the number of symbol characters to use but not which ones you can allow or disallow.

Did you set the minimum symbol characters that could be used? If it was set to "0" and someone tried to enter a password containing "!" then it would fail.

psswd-options.png

[websroger]

Thanks A Murray. That may have been the problem - I found minimum special characters was indeed zero, and changed it to 1.

[websroger]

I am not clear now on the use of "minimum symbols" If the minimum is 0, then 1 or more should be acceptable. The question remains if ! is acceptable or not.

[gws]

! is acceptable, I use it often.

[websroger]

Thanks, gws. I thought so.

[brian]

> If it was set to "0" and someone tried to enter a password containing "!" then it would fail.

No - minimum == minimum required