HTTP Authentication in URL with backslash in username

Question

I need to HTTP Basic Auth for a REST call. In the username I have to provide a domain (which has a hyphen) and then a backslash to separate it from the username, like this: DOM-AIN\user_name. Then the password is pretty benign.

This works fine with curl:

curl 'https://DOM-AIN\user_name:password@myurl.com'

I need to put this into Python now, but I've tried with requests and urllib/2/3...they don't like the \ : or the @. Even when I URL encode to %40, etc., those get interpreted as an actual : and urllib thinks I'm trying to define a port and I get an error: Invalid socket, I think, I forgot.

So I tried passing the username and password in the header using urllib3, but I get an unauthorized access error and I suspect it's because I need to somehow encode the username in the header to account for the backslash (%5C), but that doesn't seem to be working either.

Here is some code that doesn't work:

# Attempt 1
http = urllib3.PoolManager()
url1 = https://ws.....
headers = urllib3.util.make_headers(basic_auth='DOM-AIN\user_name:password')
r1 = http.request('GET', url1, headers=headers)
response = r1.data

# Attempt 2
passwordManager = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
passwordManager.add_password(None, url, 'DOM-AIN\user_name, password)
authenticationHandler = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(passwordManager)
opener = urllib2.build_opener(authenticationHandler)
data = opener.open(url1)

There were some other attempts with request, but I don't have those anymore. I can get the errors of these if it would be useful, but if there is already a known thing I'm doing wrong that would be great...

Answer 1

Backslash should be escaped in Python string literals:

username = 'DOM-AIN\\user_name' # OR
username = r'DOM-AIN\user_name' # raw-string literal

Example:

import urllib2, base64

request = urllib2.Request('https://example.com')
credentials = base64.b64encode(username + b':' + password)
request.add_header('Authorization', b'Basic ' + credentials)
response = urllib2.urlopen(request) 

Note: unlike HTTPBasicAuthHandler code; it always sends the credentials without waiting for 401 response with WWW-Authenticate header.

Answer 2

First convert your DOM-AIN\user_name into base64 string. Lets say its XXXXYYYYYYY. Now place this base64 string into the http header like below code with urllib2.

headers = { 'Authorization:' : 'Basic XXXXYYYYYYY' }
req = urllib2.Request(url, data, headers)

Answer 3

I found a way using urllib, with this post's mention of FancyURLopener sending me down the right path. This was the closest I could come to replicating the way it worked in curl, although looking at Sabuj's answer there might be a way to use headers properly, but I haven't tried his method.

import urllib
opener = urllib.FancyURLopener()
data = opener.open('https://DOM-AIN**%5C%user_name:password@url.com?whatever_parameters')
response = data.read()

It works when I only URL encoded the backslash. Didn't work when I encoded the other characters like : and @.