Master password issue with special characters (German)

Hello! Thanks for taking the time to write to us, and thank you for your support of 1Password. We would love to have full Unicode master passwords across all instances where a master password could be entered. In a technical, but not very useful, sense we do have this support. 1Password is actually indifferent to character set and character encoding choice. It will use whatever is passed to it. The difficulty is that different operating systems and environments can hand a different chunk of data to 1Password depending on the system it was entered on even if it is the "same" from the user's point of view.

We very strongly recommend that people stick to US-ASCII even though 1Password itself is entirely agnostic. This is because, for example, something like ö might be sent (by the operating system/keyboard) in different ways. We've seen cases where people switching from a US to German keyboard find that the Master Passwords no longer work even though they are typing the same things. So unless you stick to one platform and keyboard layout, the only really safe bet is to stick with old-fashioned US-ASCII.

I hope that helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

US-ASCII is a character set that was based on the English alphabet. As a character set, it was very narrow in scope and didn't provide enough characters to include alphabets other than English. It has been superseded and surpassed by UTF-8 (which is backwards compatible with US-ASCII).

The expanded scope of UTF-8 allows for the possibility of characters that look the same but are represented by different codes (and thus treated differently by a computer). As @saad mentioned above, this ambiguity can cause problems when you switch from one keyboard and language combination to another.