Who has an underscore in their name?

But yeah, if that's an issue, put that in between the brackets as well. Does anyone have a number in their name?

If they do, then maybe we want

[\\w .'-]

which will match that well-known Buffista

p.m-m'm_ m4rc0nt3ll

because the \\w includes all letters, numbers and the underscore.

Who has an underscore in their name?

Jenny_G comes to mind.

I mean, really, there's no limit to the punctuation, isn't there? Didn't a /mieskie register (and get booted, but, yeah, well)? Someone could register with an asterisk. Maybe someone has.

Spawn1, DCM1101 (Paul's user name), and a couple others I think use numbers. Anyone with ~? I know they were popular before WX let you lc your name without them.

Also, FUCKERS!!!!!

We seem to have a lot of characters in usernames that I wouldn't have expected.

It it's really that complicated, I think the concept of email address needs to be redefined to be "the bits wrapped around the @", and put the username somewhere else.

Not that you can't write a regular expression to say "anything at all goes here" but then you have to start working from the other end, "anything at all except for the @ symbol", etc.

Ooo! Did I mention we have people with @ in their names?

Did I mention we have people with @ in their names?

t starts weeping quietly

Did I mention we have people with @ in their names?

One user. I'm sure we could ask him to change it.

Yeah, that's a good idea.

How hard would it be to make some characters illegal in usernames?

I'm still a bit confused as to why we're recording, or using, people's names in the format:

John H <john@something.com>

surely if we just use the

john@something.com

bit the problem goes away?

Or, alternatively, why don't we run a quick regex over the name we're inserting, the bit in red here:

John H <john@something.com>

so that, even if my chosen username is:

J_@h.n _.*._ ~-H-~

it gets stripped back to the legal characters before being used.