Query regarding data entry form

Question

I am curious about something I encountered when I was registering on the wakari website. I entered my username which was something like abc.def.ghi and all other information and submitted the form ( or at least tried to submit! ). It threw up an error which said "username must be a valid python variable", so they were obviously doing something in their back-end with usernames as python variables. Would anyone explain to me if this is some sort of design scheme that they are using wherein they store user information as python variables or something like that. Again I apologize since this is not really a specific programming question but this is eating me up and I must know why that happened.

The following is the URL:

https://www.wakari.io/usermgmt/loginorregister

Can you post the full URL of the website? That doesn't sound too good. — Blender, Nov 10 '12 at 02:31
Check out! http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7934620/python-dots-in-the-name-of-variable-in-a-format-string — Nilam Doctor, Nov 10 '12 at 02:34

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 10 '12 at 11:14

This is pure conjecture. One thing I could see wakiri doing is using the usernames as a module name for your code. That might be interesting. So storing user code as wakiri.<username>. Then the application might be doing an import wakiri.<username> with some interesting stuff in the __init__.py that runs whatever it finds.

Maybe that's it. Or maybe they are storing user code in files on disk. Maybe user code is written out to a file that contains lots of dictionaries that contain code and are named after the username?

Maybe they aren't even using it and just think it is cute to restrict people to valid Python variables.

IanSR · Answer 2 · 2013-06-03T17:38:52.043

I'm a Wakari developer, and we've only just caught this question. The short version is that you are pretty safe with a valid UNIX username, and the "error" text should say something using better "plain english" to this effect.

The reason we say the username needs to be a valid Python module name is that we're imagining a day when users could have something like ~/public_python as a place to put directly-shareable code, and then other users could access this via something like from wakari.users import steve. We'd leave it up to you to figure out if you trust user steve enough to import his code directly.

oh that sounds like a pretty cool idea. Thanks for your reply. — anonuser0428, Jun 04 '13 at 17:27

Query regarding data entry form

2 Answers2