ConnectionStrings in app.config with characters that the .config file doesn't like

Question

I've looked for the answer and can't find it. It's got to be something obvious and I'm just missing it.

We have a connection string issue in an app.config file. It uses SQL Server authentication, and the password contains an "&" and a "+" symbol. Obviously the parsing is going wrong. Changing the password would be a hassle at this point. Is there a way to handle this?

Answer 1

Encode the '&' as '&' - ampersand is a reserved character in XML

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references

Answer 2

Since the web.config is XML, you need to escape the five special characters:

& -> & ampersand, U+0026
< --> < left angle bracket, less-than sign, U+003C
> --> > right angle bracket, greater-than sign, U+003E
"-> " quotation mark, U+0022
'-> ' apostrophe, U+0027

+ is not a problem, I suppose.

Answer 3

web.config is an XML file and XML content needs to be escaped...

Change the & to & in the password field and you are good to do.

Answer 4

Try encoding the characters. Use & for ampersand.