title: htaccess credentials in URL when password contains a hash #
body: <p>Using Selenium I am accessing protected pages. I need to put the credentials into the URL to prevent the .htaccess popup from appearing. This is the method suggested in Selenium documentation.</p>
  
  <p>One of the locations I need to access has a hash character in the password, and this causes the browser (both Chrome and Firefox) to not understand the URL and treat it as a search term.</p>
  
  <p>e.g. <a href="http://user:pass@example.com/" rel="nofollow">http://user:pass@example.com/</a> gets through, but <code>http://user:pa#ss@example.com/</code> is not recognised as a URL.</p>
  
  <p>How can I "encode" the hash?</p>