Forum Discussion
Charset issue with Basic authentication
At a high level, the answer is "whenever your Excel channel gets the December release of Power Query". There are more details in the below thread about how to determine which release channel you're on (which determines how quickly you'll receive PQ updates), and how to determine which version of PQ you have.
Ok. Let me see if there's a way to solve this without breaking backwards-compatibility.
You could handle the "charset" auth-param returned by the server in WWW-Authenticate header when the authentication fail (401 status code) as stated in Basic Authentication RFC 7617: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7617#section-2.1
If the WWW-Authenticate header returned by the server contains 'charset="UTF-8"' then re-encode username:password with UTF-8 encoding and re-emit the request.
Doing so, the encoding would change only for servers requesting UTF-8 encoding.
Because UTF-8 encoding for ASCII characters is identical to ASCII encoding, it should be safe to always encode with UTF-8. The only existing case this would "break" would be non-ASCII characters that today are being mapped to "?", but if anyone is depending on that behavior they can simply use "?" in their username/password instead.
The fix should be available in the December release of PBIDesktop.
When the fix will be available for Microsoft Excel ?
At a high level, the answer is "whenever your Excel channel gets the December release of Power Query". There are more details in the below thread about how to determine which release channel you're on (which determines how quickly you'll receive PQ updates), and how to determine which version of PQ you have.