Support for invalid characters in user name?

Question

I recently had a russian user sign up for my site,, 

Алек Зимаи�

When i click on his profile, the page cannot be found.
I am assuming this is because of the invalid character in the url.

In the future can we change the rewrite code for this to be?
 

www.site.com/q2a/user/1005/username 

Where then the query is done from the userID.  Plus I think this may prevent issues of duplicate usernames since we allow facebook connect as a 2nd option?

Comments

Undefined offset: 1 in C:\site\ask\qa-include\qa-page.php on line 518

Answer 1

My preferred solution to this would be to prevent usernames with illegal UTF-8 characters, rather than change the URL structure.

I think this example happened because you don't have multibyte string support as part of your PHP installation, so Q2A chopped off the UTF-8 string at 20 bytes, instead of 20 characters. This just so happened to split a UTF-8 double byte character in two. You can check my theory in the 'General' panel of your 'Admin' section.

As for the Facebook issue, you don't have to worry because duplicate usernames are checked for (and automatically changed if necessary).