Writing a connection string when password contains special characters
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07-07-2019 - |
Question
I'm using SQLalchemy for a Python project, and I want to have a tidy connection string to access my database. So for example:
engine = create_engine('postgres://user:pass@host/database')
The problem is my password contains a sequence of special characters that get interpreted as delimiters when I try to connect.
I realize I could just create an object and then pass my credentials like this:
drivername = 'postgres',
username = 'user',
password = 'pass',
host = 'host',
database = 'database'
But I'd much rather use a connection string if this is possible.
So to be clear, is it possible to encode my connection string, or the password part of the connection string - so that it can be properly parsed?
Solution
Backslashes aren't valid escape characters for URL component strings. You need to URL-encode the password portion of the connect string:
from urllib import quote_plus as urlquote
from sqlalchemy.engine import create_engine
engine = create_engine('postgres://user:%s@host/database' % urlquote('badpass'))
If you look at the implementation of the class used in SQLAlchemy to represent database connection URLs (in sqlalchemy/engine/url.py
), you can see that they use the same method to escape passwords when converting the URL instances into strings, and that the parsing code uses the complementary urllib.unquote_plus
function to extract the password from a connection string.