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

.net, app-config, connection-string, special-characters

Solution

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

Problem

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?

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