OVF Tool: Special Characters in URL Locators

This might be common knowledge, but it tripped me up recently so thought I would write a quick post on it. OVF Tool allows you to pass credential information to destination connections. The syntax of such commands is:

<protocol>://[<username>[:<password>]@]<host>[:<port>][<misc>]

An issue that might arise is that the password being passed has special characters. One password special character that would cause an issue is ‘@’ as it is used to separate a password from a host.
How do you escape special characters to avoid this issue?


With OVF Tool version 2.1 and greater the documentation states the following:

Encoding Special Characters in URL Locators
When you use URIs as locators, you must escape special characters using % followed by their ASCII hex value.
For instance, if you use a “@” in your password, it must be escaped with %40 as in vi://foo:b%40r@hostname,
and a slash in a Windows domain name (\) can be specified as %5c.

For a quick list of HEX values you can reference: http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm

© 2013 – 2021, Steve Flanders. All rights reserved.

4 comments on “OVF Tool: Special Characters in URL Locators

Cristina says:

Furthermore, there’s the question of what happens if URL / username / password contains non-ASCII characters

lonqi says:

tks for your help ~\(≧▽≦)/~

Leo says:

life saver, thanks a lot!!!

Josh says:

Saved me a ton of headache on this one. Appreciate you!!

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