Leading whitespace in display names messes with alphabetical sort

[boonebgorges]

If a username is entered as " Boone" rather than "Boone", it'll show up first in the list when doing an alphabetical sort. In my experience, a name is typically entered with leading whitespace by accident. But it could also be used as a sort of hack to get your profile to the top of the list. We might consider trimming this whitespace, either on the way in (at the time of profile save), or at the time of query:

ORDER BY LTRIM(u.value)

Are there legit reasons for wanting leading whitespace? Would the latter query cause performance issues at scale? Needs testing.

[sooskriszta]

While I can imagine special characters such as the exclamation/bang/! as the genuine leading letter in a name, I can't think of any reasons why a leading space would be needed.

We should trim it on profile save.

[boonebgorges]

On further testing, it appears that field data is, in fact, stripped on save. I can't see at a glance when this change took place, but the stack trace is:

• xprofile_set_field_data() causes BP_XProfile_ProfileData::save() to be run
• save() runs xprofile_data_value_before_save callbacks, including ​https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/src/bp-xprofile/bp-xprofile-filters.php?marks=55#L51
• xprofile_sanitize_data_value_before_save() runs through the 'xprofile_filtered_data_value_before_save' filter ​https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/src/bp-xprofile/bp-xprofile-filters.php?marks=188#L153
• which is trimmed ​https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/src/bp-xprofile/bp-xprofile-filters.php?marks=56#L51