Windows Users - User Name with Spaces? - Poll

Regarding you usual login user name,

  • It has one or more spaces
  • It has no spaces

0 voters

Normally, I haven’t found this to be an issue with Ruby, and I’ve run a lot of code thru standalone Ruby. Recently, some changes to the current version of Ruby (trunk) may affect this…

Thanks,

Greg

End-user facing texts should always allow common language (Unicode + spaces). For technical users, developers and domain experts it is ok to require constraints for names.

Ideally the display name John Smith is accompagnied with a canonicalized user identifier like jsmith (without spaces) for internal use in software, e.g. CLI commands. (And theoretically in 2018 Unicode is default and all programming languages and APIs are designed to handle it.) If a system does not handle the latter, it should have measures to prevent display names to be used as user identifier.

So probably the real question is, how many user names (as in internal identifier = directory name etc.) are out there in the wild that could cause problems for Ruby developers? It is likely that many people including developers have their first name (so no space), so the rare exceptions are often untested.

1 Like

I believe windows will take a new user (like ‘John Smith’) and that is exactly the user folder. I suspect this may be common with business systems/networks.

As mentioned, I have (somewhat deliberately) used an account with a space, and it has never caused any issues with my use of a lot of *nix/Linux based software, including Ruby.

Back when I was writing a lot of windows specific software, I (and some others I forced to) always developed with standard user accounts, as I’ve run into plenty of windows software apps that didn’t work unless was running as an admin. IOW, I’m somewhat attuned to these issues…

Unless a wild change occurs at Trimble, the recent changes to Ruby trunk won’t hit SU for at least a few more versions, so no cause for concern.

I suppose I should have posted the poll in one of the more general user forums…

Thanks, Greg

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