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Currently, we can use a half-width space and a half-width hyphen - in our display name (username) as a delimiter.

However, there are more delimiter symbols commonly used in the international community. For example, these two delimiters are very popular in the Japanese community.

  • a full-width space 　
  • a full-width middle dot ・

For now, if we try to include these letters in our name, the site says the following error:

Display Name can only contain letters, digits, spaces, apostrophes or hyphens and must start with a letter or digit

I want to change this behavior. How about adding more delimiters for the international community? At least, I want to add the two delimiters above for the Japanese community.

(By the way, a user in SOja community noticed an interesting behavior: we cannot use single full-width space 山田　太郎 but we can use two successive full-width spaces 山田　　太郎. So it may be a bug that we cannot use a full-width space.)

Context: Originally, a related bug report was posted to Stack Overflow for Japanese and got a lot of votes, so I post an edited report here in English.

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    Out of curiosity, why is a full-width space so common? Is it an online phenomena, or are larger spaces also common in written text?
    – ert
    Jan 17, 2020 at 5:46
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    @ert In Japanese we commonly use full-width letters "こんにちは、世界" ("Hello, World" in Japanese) so we usually use full-width spaces. By default, the full-width one is input when pushing the space key by Japanese IME. It is hard for me to determine whether we use full-width spaces in written text because there are no clear distinction between half-width and full-width in written text. But for example we use larger spaces when writing on Genkō yōshi (see the embedded image).
    – nekketsuuu
    Jan 17, 2020 at 5:57
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    I see no problem with this, looks like a reasonable request.
    – Mast
    Jan 17, 2020 at 6:28
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    These delimiters should be available on all the sites in the network, not only on international ones. Users are allowed to use Japanese usernames everywhere, so it makes sense to let them use proper delimiters
    – default locale
    Jan 17, 2020 at 10:51
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    To clarify: In this request I want to allow the delimiters on all sites. Title was edited by someone.
    – nekketsuuu
    Jan 17, 2020 at 12:02
  • nekketsuuu you should be able to rollback to the correct version.
    – Rob
    Jan 17, 2020 at 15:02
  • Those are separators not delimiters. A separator falls between a pair of elements, whereas a pair of delimiters surrounds a single element. Sepa-raters vs [delimiters].
    – tchrist
    Jan 28, 2020 at 13:09
  • @tchrist [nit] What about a comma in CSV? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delimiter
    – nekketsuuu
    Jan 28, 2020 at 13:38
  • @nekketsuuu Notice how it's a CSV file with Comma Separated Values, not a CDV file with Comma Delimited Values? :)
    – tchrist
    Jan 28, 2020 at 13:41
  • @tchrist stackoverflow.com/q/9118769/5989200
    – nekketsuuu
    Jan 28, 2020 at 13:58
  • @nekketsuuu The selected answer is wrong. The one below it is right. Words have meaning, and it is useful for different words to have different meanings because this provides for more nuanced technical discourse. The string :foo: has 3 fields if it is colon-separated, 1 if colon-delimited, and 2 if colon-terminated.
    – tchrist
    Jan 28, 2020 at 14:00
  • @tchrist No, I don't want to discuss details in comments because its preciseness is not very important here. Also please read a comment of the second answer.
    – nekketsuuu
    Jan 28, 2020 at 14:06

1 Answer 1

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The full-width space and will-width middle dot characters are now allowed in display names on all sites.

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  • 2
    Thank you! Maybe this error message should be modified, too: Display Name can only contain letters, digits, spaces, apostrophes or hyphens and must start with a letter or digit (By the way this "letters" contains several CJK characters and others. So how about changing this sentence to warn only about symbols?)
    – nekketsuuu
    Jan 28, 2020 at 12:04

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