[Cosmo-dev] Allowable Characters in Cosmo Usernames

[Todd Agulnick]

Hi,

In preparing for Cosmo's support in 0.3 for an expanded set of allowable 
characters in usernames, I ran into a few questions. The spec that's 
been communicated (but not yet formally documented) suggests that 
usernames may contain any character other than null, control characters, 
space, or forward slash ("/").

Questions:

- According to http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2396.html, non-ASCII 
characters in URI's have to be encoded & escaped in some way. I would 
assume that this means encoding as UTF-8. Is that correct?

- RFC 2396 also refers to certain reserved characters:

	reserved    = ";" | "/" | "?" | ":" | "@" | "&" | "=" | "+" | "$" | ","


We've already specifically ruled out "/", but what about the rest? Are 
they acceptable in usernames? Do they have to be escaped? Will 
http://cosmo-demo.osafoundation.org/home/mycrazyusername@here&there?/file.txt 
work?

Inquiring minds want to know. Please advise. Thanks,

-Todd