WPA key issue - very strange

I am a newbie to Macs. Plenty of experience on Windows etc., but I have encountered a very strange issue (for me at least), where the dialog box asking for my WPA wireless key will NOT allow me to type a £ sign. I cannot cut/paste a £ sign either and I can type any other character on the top row. BUT I can type a pound sign into a document or anywhere else. So, I am guessing and have checked the international settings etc. that the keyboard is fine.
I am using a Macbook Pro on OSX 10.5.8. Any clues would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

It's because the value of the £ fluctuates too rapidly to allow consistent key recovery...




You know how things seem funny in your head...and then you see them in print - and they don't have that same punch... :Blushing:

Well it was slightly amusing Brian.... not entirely helpful though

No idea as to why this should be though, if you cant type it, or paste it something is very strange. That said, you typed it in your post, so what gives?

In attempt to be more helpful (Kev made me feel bad) - it may be that the £ is not a valid character for WPA. Some quick research seems to indicate that there are only 95 valid ASCII characters for WPA passphrases.


Edit: According to the 802.11i std - the valid ascii characters are the set of values from 32 to 126. The £ symbol is not part of that set - which is why it's not allowing you to type that. It's not a valid character for a WPA passphrase. You can see this on page 1129 of the std.

Thanks for the suggestions. I typed it into the post from a PC. The WPA key works on all other devices, but not iPhones either or so it seems. But other Windows laptops and Blackberries, no problem.
Thanks for your help anyway.
PS. Are you sure about the dollar these days??

mcbh said:

Thanks for the suggestions. I typed it into the post from a PC. The WPA key works on all other devices, but not iPhones either or so it seems. But other Windows laptops and Blackberries, no problem.
Thanks for your help anyway.
PS. Are you sure about the dollar these days??

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No . . . I'm having to type in two $ everywhere I used just one before. If inflation keeps on like this I'll have to switch to Au instead.

mcbh said:

Thanks for the suggestions. I typed it into the post from a PC. The WPA key works on all other devices, but not iPhones either or so it seems. But other Windows laptops and Blackberries, no problem.
Thanks for your help anyway.
PS. Are you sure about the dollar these days??

Click to expand...

Hehe - believe me - no. I'm just glad it's not as bad as it was. When I first started visiting the UK a couple of years ago - it was more than a 2:1 ratio - which was painful.

Regarding the key information - I didn't just make that up - or stop with the first google hit. I actually looked in the 802.11i standard - here's a direct copy and paste from the standard. If I get some more time this evening - I'll research a little further. I'm curious myself.

—A pass-phrase is a sequence of between 8 and 63 ASCII-encoded characters. The limit of 63 comes
from the desire to distinguish between a pass-phrase and a PSK displayed as 64 hexadecimal
characters.
— Each character in the pass-phrase must have an encoding in the range of 32 to 126 (decimal),
inclusive.

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Took a while but I found a thread in the Apple support archives that seems to address your exact issue - https://discussions.apple.com/message/12010935?messageID=12010935

And I agree fully with Stefan from his post

So OSX is just merely following the rules whereas others (Windows) obviously don't.

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Thanks for that one Brian. I would have probably never known as I would never use that £ in my key. Nice to know for the future though. Also interesting Apple is following the rules some others are not.