Can't connect to MySQL server if password contains '#' character

terracotta.get_driver(mysql_path)

Fails when mysql_path contains ‘#’ in any part. It’s actually because of urllib.parse , which fails to parse the URL components if any of the component has ‘#’ in it. There may be other special characters too causing the issue. The password part of the URL has high probability of having these characters. My example :

mysql_path = 'mysql://root:admin#!@123@localhost:3306/db'

Also if you move the ‘#’ around in the password itself, the parsing result is different and hence the errors too

I solved it by using quote/unquote of urllib.parse : mysql_path = 'mysql://root:'+ quote('admin#!@123') + '@localhost:3306/db'

And changed https://github.com/DHI-GRAS/terracotta/blob/5776df9a58cd47b4bf0fcb29070ff40ecdf41d98/terracotta/drivers/mysql.py#L118

password=urlparse.unquote(con_params.password) if con_params.password else None,

Is this solution right way to handle the issue?

[abhi1301]

Maybe there is a way to fix this by arguing with the allowed character set of each entity (usernames must be alphanumeric, hostnames US ASCII, …), but I don’t want to be responsible for finding all the edge cases.

Well I looked into the legal characters for username, it seems any ASCII character is allowed, so if there is a colon in the username, it’s ambiguous to differentiate. I tried out some DNS parsers, they all fail. They all assume user to handle the quote/unquote for special cases. But if we are not doing that, I think only choice left is to use env variables.

[dionhaefner]

Config variables incoming in #188.