Escaping characters in authz usernames

I have some usernames which contain the '=' character, and I can't
figure out how to refer to them in the authz file.

I'm using Apache2 to serve a subversion repository, and I'm using
client certificates with FakeBasicAuth. This means that a user has to
provide a client certificate, and Apache takes the subject line of the
certificate, and uses that as the username. For example, a username
might be "/CN=Damon Wischik".

I've tried all the ways of escaping/quoting I can think of (single
quotes, double quotes, backtick, double the equal sign, \=), but all
of them lead to an Apache error message like "Failed to load the
AuthzSVNAccessFile: The character 'D' in rule '/CN' is not allowed in
authz rules".

I've seen some previous questions here about "How do I escape @ in
authz?" and "How do I escape [] in authz?" but no answer apart from a
discussion about patching which was beyond me.

Slightly off-topic -- if I can't have usernames with '=' in authz,
does anyone know how to tell Apache FakeBasicAuth to use something
else for its username, or is there a way to get authz to do username
cleaning/munging before it tests access?

Thanks,
Damon.
Received on 2012-10-08 18:39:05 CEST