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by MostAwesomeDude 4789 days ago
But not everybody has an email address! Oh noes!

No, seriously, this is a bad link, it's got no advice, and it's not helpful.

Here's some serious advice: Put a field in your database, make it Unicode, bound it according to your DBA's advice on how much space you have to spare. A couple thousand code points should be plenty. Then give your users a single field called "Name" and have it accept up to a couple thousand Unicode points. Done.

1 comments

No, it's not at all helpful in the sense of telling you what you should do. But what it's trying to do is kick you in the butt and make you think for yourself, advising you to discard some of the preconceived notions all of us have about a subject. If it doesn't make you do that about validating names in programming, you're in the wrong profession.