Specifying wireless network name with accent in wpa_supplicant.conf?

Question

How can I configure /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf to connect to a network that has an accent in its SSID? The name of the network is of form Réseau de XL1.

If I use sudo iwlist wlan0 scan|grep SSID I see the network appears as:

ESSID:"R\xC3\xA9seau de MP1"

At the moment I have the following the wpa_supplicant file (actual values modified):

network={
        ssid="Réseau de XL1"
        psk="!reseau_2014!"
        proto=RSN
        key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
        pairwise=CCMP
        auth_alg=OPEN
}

Checking the encoding of '\xC3\xA9' this suggests it is a UTF8 representation of 'é', but I am not sure if wpa_supplicant is interpreting it as UTF8?

Answer 1

You should be able to code it in hex as

ssid=52C3A973656175206465204D5031

You can generate the hex value with echo "Réseau de XL1" | xxd -p | tr a-z A-Z

Answer 2

Just replying to myself following some testing.

• Escaping the network name appears to work: R\xC3\xA9seau de MP1
• In my local setup using hexdump -C I see the encoding is UTF8 (probably a side effect of using a UTF8 based terminal)
• Also looking at the docs, for the network block, I see:

# ssid: SSID (mandatory); network name in one of the optional formats:
#   - an ASCII string with double quotation
#   - a hex string (two characters per octet of SSID)
#   - a printf-escaped ASCII string P"<escaped string>"

So I ended up with:

network={
        # ssid: Réseau de XL1
        ssid="R\xC3\xA9seau de XL1"
        psk="!reseau_2014!"
        proto=RSN
        key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
        pairwise=CCMP
        auth_alg=OPEN
}

Based on the docs I'll stick with the escaping, since that is probably safer in terms of various possible terminal encodings, even if UTF8 is likely predominate.