Problem with Hebrew characters in username

Question

I wrote a plugin to enable hebrew characters in usernames. This is the full code:

add_filter ('sanitize_user', 'hu_sanitize_user', 10, 3);

//Overrides the Wordpress sanitize_user filter to allow hebrew letters and english letters only

function hu_sanitize_user ($username, $raw_username, $strict)
{
//Strip HTML Tags
$username = wp_strip_all_tags ($raw_username);

//Remove Accents
$username = remove_accents ($username);

//Kill octets
$username = preg_replace ('|%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])|', '', $username);


//Kill entities
$username = preg_replace ('/&.+?;/', '', $username);

if ($strict){
    //Replace
    $username = preg_replace( '[\p{Hebrew}a-zA-Z]', '', $username );
}

//Remove Whitespaces
$username = trim ($username);

// Consolidate contiguous Whitespaces
$username = preg_replace ('|\s+|', ' ', $username);

return $username;

}

It works well, but the problem is that if the length of the username is more than 8 characters, it doesn't create a user in the users list. However, it does still send a confirmation email that the user was created - with the name and e-mail address missing from the message.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

This is not a complete answer, but it's an attempt at giving you some direction. Hopefully with the community here we can come up with a solution for you!

Firstly, I've been able to replicate your issue:

1. I took your code and placed it in my theme's functions.php for now.
2. I removed the if( $strict ) test
3. I tried registering an 8 character Hebrew name - it worked
4. I removed your function and tried again - it failed (this confirms your function works)
5. I added your function and tried with a 9 character Hebrew name - it failed

(for non-Hebrew speakers following along, I just used Google Translate and translated my own name to Hebrew, then dropped characters).

When it didn't work, the error I got was:

ERROR: Couldn’t register you… please contact the webmaster !

I've never seen this error before. It comes from wp-includes/user.php. What this tell us, hunting through the order of this, is that wp_create_user(), and therefore wp_insert_user(), is either returning false or an error object.

wp_insert_user() has a heck of a lot of filters we could potentially plug into to help this work. It may be tripping up one of these.

Alternatively, it may be a database issue. This StackOverflow answer has some ideas for supporting Hebrew characters in a MySQL database. My table encoding was already set to utf8_general_ci but my database itself wasn't, so I changed that and unfortunately it didn't resolve it. I also tried running the SET NAMES query through wpdb, but it's possible it's not meant to work like that.

Where to from here

I'm hardly a database expert, so I'm not sure if this is a database limitation that we may end up not being able to get around. For now, I think the best chance lies in one of those filters that wp_insert_user() goes through.

I don't have time right now to hunt through these in depth and work out where it's tripping up, but hopefully this gives you a decent head start - if I can I'll come back and see what else I can find.