Special characters - dash?

The 2.4 Ghz network SSID cannot contain special characters. Does this include dash, “-”?

I’m helping someone remotely setup a Wyze Cam. He’s fairly clueless but has done it before at one house he’s at the other). His router shows two nets, 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz, and I believe he has his phone connected to the 2.4 Ghz (the 5 Ghz has “-5G” appended).

Problem is, the camera keeps saying “Cannot connect to local network”.

His 2.4 Ghz SSID has a dash in it. If he types in the network name wrong, or if he types in the password wrong, he gets different errors. I believe I’ve gotten him past all the stupid errors - caps lock, etc. I’m out of ideas other than getting into the router (Arris DG2460A on Dish) and poking around.

Assumption his Wyze app works with two locations simultaneously, but reading the forum here apparently that’s OK.

I use hyphens in my SSIDs, and don’t have any problems. The only known problem is leading and trailing spaces in the SSID. Here is Wyze’s official support page on it.

There are two other threads you may be interested in as well.

2 Likes

Darn. I wanted to use “¯\_(ツ)_/¯” as my SSID.

Never mind, clueless user outsmarted me, found his mistake.

I asked because Wyze’s doc says “be careful about special characters like …”, not explicitly stating which special characters are illegal - at least that’s the way I read it.

Stick to alphanumeric and you should be fine. Not sure what punctuation might be supported or not, but overall, support may be dicier with other devices, too. Alphanumeric seems safest. Having said that, my SSID has a question mark in it, and everything works fine. I imagine a normal dash and underline would work fine, too. If you get into fancier stuff like an endash or emdash, maybe not.

In general, I think “special characters” usually refers to anything outside the ASCII printable character range. Although even some of those characters can cause problems sometimes – Particularly spaces, single quotes, and double quotes. If you’re working with URLs, #, /, and ? can cause problems, too. Mainly that’s because they commonly interfere with syntax/code. If code is poorly written, those characters may inadvertently break things.

The SSI my Wyze cameras (and dozens of other IOT devices I have) connect to is Iompróidh2G and I haven’t had any problems with it.

1 Like

Wyze, is this fixed yet??? This is terrible programming to not match the rules for what chars the SSID can contain. Fix this. My company has a the char ! (bang) in the name and I want to use that when broadcasting my SSID to the office. There is NO reason this should cause an issue other than you are hiring inexperienced or lazy people as software engineers.