Unicode characters in Django usernames

Question

I am developing a website using Django 1.4 and I use django-registration for the signup process. It turns out that Unicode characters are not allowed as usernames, whenever a user enters e.g. a Chinese character as part of username the registration fails with:

This value may contain only letters, numbers and @/./+/-/_ characters.

Is it possible to change it so Unicode characters are allowed in usernames? If yes, how can I do it? Also, can it cause any problem?

Answer 1

It is really not a problem - because this character restriction is in UserCreationForm (or RegistrationForm in django-registration) only as I remember, and you can easily make your own since field in database is just normal TextField.

But those restriction is there not without a reason. One of the possible problems I can think of now is creating links - usernames are often used for that and it may cause a problem. There is also bigger possibility of fake accounts with usernames looking the same but being in fact different characters, etc.

Answer 2

Django 1.10 now officially supports unicode usernames, see:

The User model in django.contrib.auth originally only accepted ASCII letters in usernames. Although it wasn’t a deliberate choice, Unicode characters have always been accepted when using Python 3.

The username validator now explicitly accepts Unicode letters by default on Python 3 only. This default behavior can be overridden by changing the username_validator attribute of the User model, or to any proxy of that model, using either ASCIIUsernameValidator or UnicodeUsernameValidator. Custom user models may also use those validators.