[Mediawiki-l] Changing password for user with special utf characters in name

[Daniel Friesen]

On Sat, 17 Dec 2011 21:52:27 -0800, Dan Nessett <dnessett at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I am trying to use changePassword.php to change the password of a user
> (who has forgotten his password). The name of the user has the spanish
> character tilde-n in it (UTF-8 \xF1). However, I can't figure out how to
> specify this character in the --user= value. When I try to use \xF1, the
> maintenance script sees it as the literal character string "xF1". If I
> use \\xF1, the script sees the literal character sring "\xF1". I can't
> figure out how to get the script to accept the unicode string encoding.
>
> Any ideas?
>
>

Quite simply, this will depend entirely on your shell. Character escapes  
just like 'asdf' vs "asdf" vs asdf and things like {foo,bar} and * are all  
handled at the shell level so the answer is whatever method your shell  
uses.
In some cases you might actually be able to just copy and paste the  
unicode character in.

If all else fails in your attempts to figure out how to get your shell to  
pass the unicode in changePassword.php accepts a --userid parameter you  
can use instead of the username.

-- 
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]