Tableau metaloader from command line signin error 401

[hroderick-thr]

I wanted to share a solution to a challenge we hit upgrading to the 2020.2 Tableau metaloader.

The app would run fine manually, but when run from command line api signin to tableau would fail with a 401 error.

The problem was being caused by special characters in the password. It is tricky to get these coded just right because some characters must be escaped to resolve correctly. 

The old metaloader must have been handling the special characters better than 2020.2 

I got around it by using only these special characters in my password -  _  ~ 

Past research discovered these other special characters require special handling for use in either command line or url   ! * ' ( ) ; : @ & = + $ , / ? # [ ] | < > \ ^ ” * %   

Avoid them to avoid head-banger problems.