The PasswordSpecChar parameter determines how you can use ASCII special characters in a password, with these options:
- Special characters are allowed, not allowed, or required
- Passwords must contain at least one alpha character
- No password can contain the database username
- Passwords must contain a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters
- Upper includes all UNICODE characters in General Category Class Lu.
- Lower includes all UNICODE characters in General Category Class Ll.
- Alpha includes all UNICODE characters that are in either Upper (Lu) or Lower (Ll)
- Special indicates characters that are neither Alpha nor any of the characters 0 through 9 (U+0030 – U+0039). By this definition, un-cased letters (General Category Class Lo) are considered Special (for example, Arabic, Chinese or Hebrew characters). Likewise numeric digits (General Category Class Nd) other than the characters 0 through 9 (U+0030 – U+0039) are classified as Special.
For consistency in handling characters, the system checks PasswordSpecChar based on the NFC representation of the password string. For example, the character ‘é’ (U+00E9) is a Special, a Lower, and an Alpha character.