Name or other required profile fields can be whitespace

[justinph]

When registering, a user can enter a single or multiple space characters into the Name field (note: not username).

While technically a space is a character, entries that are simply whitespace should probably not be allowed for any required profile field.

Once registered, users with spaces or null characters are difficult to sort in the users listing inside WordPress.

[walbo]

Trim whitespace in required profile field

[justinph]

Make compat with php prior to 5.5.

[justinph]

This fails in php < 5.5. I just learned the hard way, empty() is a language construct (see: ​http://stackoverflow.com/a/2173318) and you can't pass it the result of a function prior to 5.5, it can only operate on a variable.

The new patch works and should be more compatible with earlier versions of php.

[DJPaul]

Hi walbo, justinph; thank you for reporting the issue and working on a patch.

I can confirm the issue, and agree that whitespace-like characters probably shouldn't be accepted in a required field. :)
What we need to do next is test old versions of BuddyPress and see if this behaviour has always been the same, or if we broke something in a specific version of BuddyPress. Knowing this will inform us of how much consequence this kind of change might have or not.

(If I had to guess, I'd suspect I broke something in the 2.0 release when I re-wrote profile fields to use a new BP_XProfile_Field_Type class.) :)

[DJPaul]

The patch addresses the validation logic done in the user registration process, but also needs to handle the edit profile field save handler. (This logic being duplicated is annoying and is a legacy issue that no-one's gotten around to consolidating yet.)

[boonebgorges]

agree that whitespace-like characters probably shouldn't be accepted in a required field

Just to clarify: we shouldn't allow values that consist of *nothing but* whitespace characters. We should, of course, continue to allow spaces.

Trimming the value of the $_POST payload before saving seems fine to me.