Passwords · Accents and ñ
I used ñ or accents in my password: how that affects recovery
If your password had an ñ, an accent or a diaeresis, and it won’t open now, it is quite possible your password is correct and the problem is how it is being typed. It is one of the most real and least known causes of lockout, and it mainly affects people who write in Spanish.
The problem, in one sentence
An accented letter can be stored on a computer in two different ways: as a single character, or as the plain letter followed by an accent mark. Both look exactly the same on screen, but they are not the same text to the program checking your password.
If you created the password on a system that stored it one way and you now type it on another that uses the other, the wallet will tell you it is wrong even though you are typing it perfectly. The typical case is creating the wallet on a Mac and trying on Windows, or the other way round.
The concrete cases I see
| Situation | What to try |
|---|---|
| Created on a Mac, trying on Windows | Both ways of writing the accent |
| Created on Windows, trying on Linux | The same |
| Password with ñ | Also try with n, and with ñ in both forms |
| Password with ü | Try with and without the diaeresis |
| Typed on a phone | Check the keyboard hasn’t autocorrected it |
How to test it yourself
- Type the password using your current system’s usual keyboard and key combination.
- Type it by copying from an older text of yours, if you have one where that accented word appears.
- Try the unaccented version: many people typed «Espana» even though they remember «España».
- Try the version with the accent applied the other way, typing the letter and then the accent separately if your system allows it.
And if the problem isn’t accents but symbols, see the sibling article: my keyboard layout changed, which covers the other half of this same phenomenon.