Non-Alphanumeric?

[rynoceris84]

Is there any way that I can make the Username field in Self-Registration accept non-alphanumeric characters?  Is there any reason why it would be a bad idea to do that?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Ryan

[Pierre M.]

Hello Ryan,

Is there any way that I can make the Username field in Self-Registration accept non-alphanumeric characters?  Is there any reason why it would be a bad idea to do that?

What about asking eBay, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, DailyMotion and all other internet Majors what are their reasons not to do that ?

Pierre M.

[calguy1000]

Well, I can think of two reasons
1) Non alphanumeric character support would make it alot easier to exploit any potential SQL injection bugs (especially since this is a key field, and used all over the place)
2) Non alphanumeric character support may cause problems with database character sets, or the html character set
and introduce alot more bugs than I'm prepared to handle at the moment.

[rynoceris84]

Thanks for the great explanations guys!  This makes much more sense now that I think about it.