Problem while retrieving values from table

I am storing password in encrypted form in mysql. Now when the user logsin back, I am retrieving those values from the table and comparing those values with the encrypted value of the password of the user who is trying to login but the problem is that I am getting different values from my tables.

I have used rs.getString ("password")
where password is the field name.

This value is in the table
���7�����]�����7vg�
But the retrieved value is
???7???]???7vg?

Why is it so?

Did you decrypt the password after retriving it from the table?
Just check it.

Even I faced this problem when i used Oracle.

I think, When you retrive the encrypted data from DB in java code,
since java dosent support those characters it's replaced by '?' or something.

What you can do is decrypt the password and return it to java, let java compare this with the one user has entered.

Let see what others say ..

Ps: In my case I have encrypted the password in the database.
like insert into emp values ( 12,encrypt('passwrd' ) )
[ December 20, 2005: Message edited by: Srinivasa Raghavan ]

But I want to store in encrypting form in my tables

Yes,

The insert statement in the above post will encrypt the data and store it in the DB.

insert into emp values ( 10, encrypt ('passwd') );

Select decrypt(password) from emp where id = 10

Like I explained in the Beginner forum where you double posted this question, you shouldn't store non-text, such as your encrypted password, in a text-based column type in the database.

You could use Base64 encoding to change the encrypted password into ASCII characters. The Apache Jakarta Commons Codec library contains a class to do Base64 encoding and decoding.

But I want to store binary values. What type of field should I use in mySQL?

See chapter 11 of the MySQL manual. You'll probably want to use BINARY or VARBINARY.

Quote:
"The BINARY and VARBINARY types are similar to CHAR and VARCHAR, except that they contain binary strings rather than non-binary strings. That is, they contain byte strings rather than character strings. This means that they have no character set, and sorting and comparison is based on the numeric values of the bytes in column values."

A couple points.
1. A agree with the previous posts about binary != text.
2. For things like passwords, you can use a one-way *digest* (MessageDigest) instead of an encryption because there is usually no need to decrypt passwords -- it's enough to digest what the user types in and then compare it to the original digested password.
3. It's a good idea not to store *just* the password, either encrypted or digested. That is because jim could notice that both he and sally have the same stored value in the password column, therefore he and sally must have the same password! I usually combine the password and username when digesting.