Maybe you are using the BotTracker plugin? someone reported the same issue when using this plugin.

same problem. update from 2.3 to 2.4.
I used special-chars like ampersand.
From piwik 0.9 to 2.3, that was never a problem.

it was necessary to repair the config file manually.
i dont use BotTracker

@ways2web thanks for report. maybe you use some other "non standard" plugin from the Marketplace? If not then it is for sure a bug in Piwik that we will fix.

I don't use any plugins (non-Core) on my installation.

Same here while updating from 2.3.0 to 2.4.0. The DB password was altered in some way and I found special characters HTML escaped (& &quote;) that broke the whole update process.
I use a basic Piwik installation, no plugins at all.

I have the same problem and it seems related to the SecurityInfo plugin that was not up to date (1.0.2 instead of 1.0.5). Now that I upgraded to 1.0.5, this & replacement issue in password did not happen again... for now

Same problem for me...

May it be possible that the bug fix http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/5349 leads to this error?

Because normally without INI_SCANNER_RAW the escaped ampersand would have been evaluated by php to a normal ampersand and everything would be fine?

But the more interesting question is: Why does the update process escape an ampersand to &?

talked too fast, issue appeared again
I deactivated every plugin and here is how to reproduce:
1/ use db password containing a &
2/ activate a plugin
3/ KABOOM => the & in the password is modified to &

This problem started when upgrading from 2.3.x to 2.4.0

Thanks for the report! So far I cannot reproduce this issue yet.

• What version of PHP are you using?

May it be possible that the bug fix http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/5349 leads to this error

@krautnerds you're right it's likely this change that introduced the bug you're experiencing. I hope I can reproduce it soon in order to fix it!

After more investigation: it is expected that the characters are HTML encoded. When Piwik reads the config file the values should be HTML decoded.

It works for me locally but it seems many of you have an issue. Could someone please give me access to your Piwik server so I can reproduce there and try to understand why the values are not HTML decoded as they should be? (code)

I use debian wheezy php 5.4.4-14+deb7u11
and sorry, but I can't give you access to my servers, but if you give me a roadmap, I might be of some help: just tell me where to put some hooks and I'll try to pinpoint the place where things go wrong

+1 for a fix for this. Had an &, " and > in my password, and it didn't work. It was properly HTML encoded in the config file, but db connectivity didn't come back until I changed the password to one with no special characters.

what is your PHP version used?

@scottnonnenberg @pmaziere @krautnerds @sdussaut @ways2web @olivierlambert

If one of you can give us temporary access to the Piwik files, this would be appreciated to troubleshoot (email hello@piwik.org)

About my version of PHP: using Debian stable, so it's PHP 5.4.4-14+deb7u11

I'll check if I can give you an access.

I can reproduce it on my "Ubuntu-precise" with "PHP 5.3.10-1ubuntu3.11 with Suhosin-Patch". Will debug it now

It was caused by INI_SCANNER_RAW indeed

Thanks for the fix 👍