In this tutorial I will share the steps to setup http_proxy or
https_proxy when your username or password contains special characters
such as comma, @, # etc.
Error: Unable to set http_proxy or https_proxy with special characters in username or password
Normally while exporting http_proxy or https_proxy we are supposed
to provide the username and password along with the proxy IP and port.
It would work in most cases but if the username or password contains
some special characters then you may get
Resolving s... failed: Name or service not known.
wget: unable to resolve host address “s”
The error output may vary depending upon the character involved in the username or password. There are two ways you can overcome this error:
Solution-1: Convert text to hex unicode
You must use mapping “hexadecimal unicode” values of respective special characters in the proxy username and password. To get the list of mapping Unicode characters follow https://unicodelookup.com/
For example, a password such as “P@$$\/\/0,#” can be converted into
P ⇒ P <-- No lookup required
@ ⇒ 0x40
$ ⇒ 0x24
$ ⇒ 0x24
\ ⇒ 0x5C
/ ⇒ 0x2F
\ ⇒ 0x5C
/ ⇒ 0x2F
0 ⇒ 0 <-- No lookup required
, ⇒ 0x2C
# ⇒ 0x23
So if we combine this for “P@$$\/\/0,#” we get
“P0x400x240x5C0x2F0x5C0x2F00x2C0x23”
Now you can export your http_proxy:
# export http_proxy="http://username:P0x400x240x5C0x2F0x5C0x2F00x2C0x23@server:port/"
Similarly to export https_proxy
# export https_proxy="https://username:P0x400x240x5C0x2F0x5C0x2F00x2C0x23@server:port/"
Solution-2: Provide username and password with wget
Instead of going through the conversion you can also provide the
username and password in plain text format with wget command
# wget -e use_proxy=yes -e https_proxy=10.xx.xx.xx:8080 --proxy-user='user' --proxy-password='P@$\/\/0,#' https://domain.com/file
From the man page of wget:
--proxy-user=user
--proxy-password=password
Specify the username user and password password for authentication on a proxy server. Wget will encode them
using the "basic" authentication scheme.
This solution is only valid if you plan to use wget or else to apply
system wide proxy you can use
Solution 1 where either
username or password has any special characters.
Conclusion
In this tutorial I shared the steps to configure http_proxy and
https_proxy when username and/or password section contains any special
characters. In the provided unicode page you can search for your char
and then look out for hexadecimal unicode value of the respective
char. Next just replace the special character with the unicode value and
you would be able to export the proxy in your Linux server.
References
I have used below external references for this tutorial guide
How
to export the variable “http_proxy” when there are special characters in
password?
