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Asked: 2026-06-17T21:35:59+00:00

I added a username and password for a basic authentication on Apache, and I

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I added a username and password for a basic authentication on Apache, and I want to have Unicode AuthName strings to my users. My httpd.conf looks like this:

<Location "/">
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Some Unicode Here"
    AuthUserFile /somewhere/htpasswd
    Require valid-user
</Location>

But “Some Unicode Here” always appears to be garbage in my browser. How do I make it appear properly?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You may not be able to make it work, lack of browser support is the main issue, see What character encoding should I use for a HTTP header?.
    The AuthName appears as the realm in the WWW-Authenticate header:

    WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Some Unicode Here"

    Some quick experimentation shows:

    • Apache does not encode a UTF-8 AuthName string in the config, it sends it as-is
    • Firefox, MSIE and Chrome all (correctly) interpret that UTF-8 byte sequence as ISO-8859-1 (and hence likely display it incorrectly)
    • none support RFC-2047 MIME encoding as stated by HTTP RFC-2616, the display it literally as =?utf-8?B?U29tZSBVbmljb2RlIEhlcmUK?=

    (I suggest mod_auth_tkt as cookie-based a replacement for basic auth if you have the option, it has a drop-in htpasswd style perl script, and sets REMOTE_USER, you just need to roll your own form.)

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