Can we use special characters for the "Public Username"?

[snowp...@gmail.com]

Using special characters on the file "Public Username" in edx is forbidden. I assume there are technical reasons for that? Or may I turn off this restrictions somehow?

[Sarina Canelake]

I don't know if there's a specific reason for it, but I would think that there's a lot of code in the platform that wouldn't cleanly handle unicode appearing in usernames. I would recommend against just turning it on - you would need to run the full test suite and see what all might fail from unicode usernames --- and even then, errors likely would appear, because we likely have lots of apps who don't even test against a unicode username.

Sorry about that.

Sarina

On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 5:24 AM, <snowp...@gmail.com> wrote:

Using special characters on the file "Public Username" in edx is forbidden. I assume there are technical reasons for that? Or may I turn off this restrictions somehow?

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[r...@efabless.com]

Hello Sarina,

         is this still the case with the 2016 release of open edx?

-Rajeev

[Ned Batchelder]

Rajeev,

This thread doesn't describe what goes wrong if you use non-ASCII in the Public Username.  Can you give it a quick try and tell us what you find?

--Ned.

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[Omar Al-Ithawi]

Hi All,

It's my pleasure to help on this.

At Edraak.org we try to support the unicode usernames (with spaces) and so far we're doing well.

I know this is against Django but it is working fine with us, even in Dogwood.

I know this is needed in a lot of global edX installations, but not sure if edX is willing to take it as an opensource contribution.

Since this is an ongoing process at Edraak (to support unicode everywhere), the following pull requests are an example of what we did:

• Allow editing users with unicode usernames
• Allow Arabic username in combined registration form
  
• Fixed unicode decode issue with csv grades
  
• Fix Unicode error in `/dashboard`
  
• Allowed unicode in usernames
  

Thanks,

[Ned Batchelder]

Omar, are you planning to contribute these changes back into the common code?  It seems like others would like to have them.  Is there a reason not to contribute them?

--Ned.

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[Omar Al-Ithawi]

Hi Ned,

Yes, I would like to contribute those changes. I didn't do it, because they have potential Django compatibility issues (which we try actively to solve, and has been successful so far). Also I wasn't sure that the openedx would be interested in this feature.

I will put it on my list and try to work on it once I have time.

Thanks,

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Omar Al-Ithawi

Senior Engineer, Edraak.org

Queen Rania Foundation

for Education & Development

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[Ned Batchelder]

Omar, great to hear!  If there is work needed to get the changes ready, maybe someone here would like to help?

--Ned.

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[Felipe Montoya]

Hello Omar!

Thanks a lot for your work on supporting special characters for usernames. Your fork was the first stop in our research to get that working for us a few months ago. If you need any help with this or you ever want to discuss any problems you find with those usernames, let me know and I will be happy to help.

Cheers

--

Felipe

[Omar Al-Ithawi]

Hi Felipe and Ned,

I've created this pull request to support unicode usernames. More details in the pull request:

• https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/pull/12805
  

Thanks,