character § not supported as WiFi Password

Hopefully someone else will give a more useful reply than this.
According to Wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-FiProtectedAccess , I do not have access to the original IEEE documents, the key should be quote.
'This key may be entered either as a string of 64 hexadecimal digits, or as a passphrase of 8 to 63 printable ASCII characters.'

I understand that the § symbol is not a printable ASCII or an Hexadecimal character, if this information is correct it would imply the using the § character is not supported by the standard, and it seems if that is correct that Apple are following the standard.

Is it possible that you could check one of the working machines and look at the wireless config file with a hex editor and see if the § character is being converted from, probably UTF-8, into ASCII by the Wireless set up utility. If it is you could then use those ASCII characters in place of the § symbol.

That's the best I can come up with, as I said earlier hopefully someone else will have the correct answer for you.

I am not familiar with the layout of German keyboards. I assume you use that style of keyboard. They are different from US keyboards, though.

If that character is a "diacritic" that requires a precursory keystroke before depressing another key to create the § character, that may be the problem. For example, on US-style keyboards, in order to create an umlaut character ä, ö, or ü, we have to type option-u followed by a, option-u followed by o, or option-u followed by u. I went into System Preferences > International and enabled a German keyboard. I don't see § on the German keyboard in "International," so am thinking that it must be a diacritical character.

If so, that may be an as-yet unresolved long-standing bug in the Apple GUI whereby typed characters that are masked by a series of ••••• when typing are not properly recognized when employing diacritical precursory keystrokes. I ran across this issue a few years ago with masked passwords in Tiger. Unlike your situation, however, I was able to change the underlying passphrase of the host, so I don't know whether the "masked diacritical" problem has been ever fixed or not. I first brought it up with the guy who created the GPGMail plugin, or maybe it was one of the other related plugins. Whoever it was told me that he had filed a bug report with Apple. But I don't know if the problem was ever fixed, because of my work-around to avoid diacritical characters.

I don't know, with a German-layout keyboard, what the diacritical key sequence would be, if that is the issue, or how you might be able to get around it.

I don't see § on the German keyboard in "International," so am thinking that it must be a diacritical character.

No, it's an ordinary character located at Shift + 3. §

It is printable. See http://www.whatsmyip.org/htmlcharacters/asciiprint.php. It is character number 167. Non-printable refers to the first 32 ASCII codes which are chiefly "control" characters like ^H for backspace or ^J for linefeed. More info on that at http://www.csgnetwork.com/asciiset.html

So it is. Don't know how I missed that. So much for that idea... 😟

I did look at 3 ASCII character sets before I posted including extended ones but I did not see that one. There must be a few different versions around.
However the Apple airport will not let me enter that character on my machine.

I will have another look around for answers.

regards

It is printable. See http://www.whatsmyip.org/htmlcharacters/asciiprint.php. It is character number 167.

That chart is puzzling. ASCII by definition has only 128 characters, and § is not one of them. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#ASCIIprintablecharacters

Anything with 256 characters is some other character set, like ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252 or MacRoman.

Launch /Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app and doubleclick on the WiFi password item there, then click on the "show password" checkbox in the resultant dialog box and authenticate? Is § displaying properly in the password field?

Okay. But somebody made http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_ASCII, upon which http://www.whatsmyip.org/htmlcharacters/asciiprint.php is apparently based. In any event, I adopt the viewpoint from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#ASCIIprintablecharacters that says "ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing control characters..." so, in my world, if I can see it on a printed page (even as an "extended ASCII" or ISO-8859-1 or unicode character) then I personally classify it as printable. A carriage return or line feed or backspace I consider non-printable. But that's just me. All I can say is, ya' just gotta luv standards. They've got one for everything. Meanwhile, the O.P. is still broken, and I'm at a loss for ideas.

Tom,
Is the Mac,or iPhone under warranty, it may be that Apple knows of the problem and has the answer, a call to them may solve it.

If not I can only go back to my first suggestion of finding out what values in Hex you company uses and enter those.

As regards ASCII, well all my experience with it from years ago was 7 bits and 128 codes. The 8th bit was for parity, but then again I used paper tape and punch cards!

good luck, hope you resolve it.

in my world, if I can see it on a printed page (even as an "extended ASCII" or ISO-8859-1 or unicode character) then I personally classify it as printable.

That's reasonable. The total number of them defined by Unicode so far is a bit more than 100,000.

Unfortunately "extended ascii" is kind of a meaningless term, because the 2nd group of 128 characters could be anything, unless you also specify an iso or other standard.

Note that the Wikipedia article quoted above also contains a link to ASCII printable characters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#ASCIIprintablecharacters

defined as being ASCII characters 32 - 126:

<pre> 32 sp 33 ! 34 " 35 # 36 $ 37 % 38 & 39 '
40 ( 41 ) 42 * 43 + 44 , 45 - 46 . 47 /
48 0 49 1 50 2 51 3 52 4 53 5 54 6 55 7
56 8 57 9 58 : 59 ; 60 < 61 = 62 > 63 ?
64 @ 65 A 66 B 67 C 68 D 69 E 70 F 71 G
72 H 73 I 74 J 75 K 76 L 77 M 78 N 79 O
80 P 81 Q 82 R 83 S 84 T 85 U 86 V 87 W
88 X 89 Y 90 Z 91 \[ 92 \ 93 \] 94 ^ 95 _
96 ` 97 a 98 b 99 c 100 d 101 e 102 f 103 g
104 h 105 i 106 j 107 k 108 l 109 m 110 n 111 o
112 p 113 q 114 r 115 s 116 t 117 u 118 v 119 w
120 x 121 y 122 z 123 { 124 | 125 } 126 ~</pre>

Further, the applicable IEEE spec:

http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/802.11i-2004.pdf

makes it even more explicit on page 166:

Here, the following assumptions apply:

— A pass-phrase is a sequence of between 8 and 63 ASCII-encoded characters. The limit of 63 comes from the desire to distinguish between a pass-phrase and a PSK displayed as 64 hexadecimal characters.

— Each character in the pass-phrase *must have an encoding in the range of 32 to 126 (decimal), inclusive*.

Note that the Wikipedia article quoted above also contains a link to ASCII printable characters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#ASCIIprintablecharacters

Thanks, I certainly did note that and provided the exact same link earlier in the thread. Are some of the messages not appearing?

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=9934736#9934736

The Problem is Not how to Write §, the Problem is that it doesn't work in the WiFi password. As i Said, i have the Same Problem with à mac Book pro under Leopard...
Windows xp, vista and even seven do work. 😟

Here's an off the wall idea to try: Using a non-ascii character in a password creates the possibility of default encoding mismatches. If there is an Mac/Windows encoding mismatch in this case, then perhaps typing ß on the Mac will generate the bytes need to emulate Windows §. ß is Option/alt + s on the US layout, - in the German layout.