How was an empty handle in qa_users possible?

Question

Found in my error log:

Undefined offset: 4148 qa-include/pages/users.php on line 68

Then checked the user with userid 4148:

handle is "" // empty!

How is that possible? Shouldn't that be caught on the registration level? I disabled the name change of users, so it must be registration level.

Answer 1

This could happen if they use emoji characters. They are not "empty" in PHP, but then MySQL discards them. See this question.

This is fixed in 1.7.3 which has just been released!

Comments

Very interesting, how could you find out about this?!

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A lot of googling and testing!