Today I Learnt (TIL)
Do not use fancy/ reserved/ escape characters in your system ID password!
Why?
I stumbled upon a case whereby a system Id has got multiple special characters in it today. Encryption and serialization went haywire and I spent so much time debugging it so I thought of giving guidelines:
- Don’t use quotes nor double quotes as they are mostly used to enclose string literals
- Don’t use backslashes as they are usually used as an escape sequence
- Don’t use colons as they are commonly used as a key value separator (e.g. in JSON)
I know sometimes we want to make password hard to crack by adding special characters, but I think the above should be strictly off limits as they might cause you serious time wastage when trying to serialize or encrypt them.