How to escape @ in a password in pymongo connection?

Question

My question is a specification of how can i validate username password for mongodb authentication through pymongo?.

I'm trying to connect to a MongoDB instance using PyMongo 3.2.2 and a URL that contains the user and password, as explained in MongoDB Docs. The difference is that the password I'm using contains a '@'.

At first I simply tried to connect without escaping, like this:

prefix = 'mongodb://'

user = 'user:passw_with_@_'

suffix = '@127.0.0.1:27001/'

conn = pymongo.MongoClient(prefix + user + suffix)

Naturally I got the following error:

InvalidURI: ':' or '@' characters in a username or password must be escaped according to RFC 2396.

So I tried escaping the user:pass part using urllib.quote() like this:

prefix = 'mongodb://'

user = urllib.quote('user:passw_with_@_')

suffix = '@127.0.0.1:27001/'

conn = pymongo.MongoClient(prefix + user + suffix)

but then I got a:

OperationFailure: Authentication failed.

(Important to say that using a GUI MongoDB Management Tool (Robomongo, if that matters) I'm able to connect to the MongoDB using the (real) address and credentials.)

Printing user variable in the code above generated a 'user:passw_with_%40_' String (that is '@' became '%40') and according to wikipedia that's the expected escaping.

I even tried escaping the @ with single and double backslashes (user = 'user:passw_with_\\@_' and user = 'user:passw_with_\@_'), but those failed with the InvalidURI exception.

TL;DR;

My question is: How do I escape a '@' in the password part of a MongoDB URL?

Answer 1

You should be able to escape the password using urllib.quote(). Although you should only quote/escape the password, and exclude the username: ; otherwise the : will also be escaped into %3A.

For example:

import pymongo 
import urllib 

mongo_uri = "mongodb://username:" + urllib.quote("p@ssword") + "@127.0.0.1:27001/"
client = pymongo.MongoClient(mongo_uri)

The above snippet was tested for MongoDB v3.2.x, Python v2.7, and PyMongo v3.2.2.

The example above assumed in the MongoDB URI connection string:

• The user is created in the admin database.
• The host mongod running on is 127.0.0.1 (localhost)
• The port mongod assigned to is 27001

For Python 3.x, you can utilise urllib.parse.quote() to replace special characters in your password using the %xx escape. For example:

url.parse.quote("p@ssword")