#17386: Validation & Unicode Character 'ZERO WIDTH SPACE' (U+200B)
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Reporter: pennersr | Owner: nobody
Type: Uncategorized | Status: new
Component: Forms | Version: 1.3
Severity: Normal | Resolution:
Keywords: | Triage Stage: Unreviewed
Has patch: 0 | Needs documentation: 0
Needs tests: 0 | Patch needs improvement: 0
Easy pickings: 0 | UI/UX: 0
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Comment (by pennersr):
> Django won't alter user input silently — it's a bad practice that can
backfire in interesting ways.
> And I'm not in favor of defeating a purposeful (although debatable)
anti-spam mechanism.
In this case it is debatable on whether that character is in fact user
input, as the user inputting the e-mail address is totally unaware of that
character being sent to the server.
That character is apparently meant to trick robots in such away that they
won't recognize the e-email address. However, a user cannot tell the
difference between two e-mail addresses, one with, and one without the
character.
Therefore:
- It would be indeed be wrong to raise a ValidationError, as the user
wouldn't know what to do -- he literally does not see the problem.
- It would be wrong to accept the accept the value as is, as two "equal"
e-mail addresses do not pass the equality test (==, iexact), causing all
sorts of trouble in any Django app comparing e-mail addresses.
As for altering input silently: multiple representations of the same date
are all mapped to a single representation under the hood, so why don't we
do the same for multiple representations of the same e-mail address?
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Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/17386#comment:4>
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