this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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Cybersecurity
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I've had it happen to me a few times on my phone that the stupid auto complete would write my email with a space after, and then the even more stupid form would take the space into account.
Took me a while to realise what was going on!
This has been something frustrating about switching to FUTO keyboard recently. Its auto space insertion isn't clever enough not to activate in username/email fields, compared to Gboard. So because many of my logins contain a period, I have to catch and remove all the extraneous spaces now.
Yeah, and it's annoying to type e.g. or i.e. I wish it was smarter.
Input forms can be designed so that an email input doesn't put a space in it. Notice the .com, .org or whatever doesn't do that, it's just when it's in the username portion. Its just lazy programming to not do it.
100% why I wrote "the even more stupid form". Someone isn't sanitizing inputs and it drives me nuts every time.
Idk, I don't think silently removing whitespace in the middle of the text is appropriate (though beginning and end should be stripped), but the form should warm you when there's obviously invalid input.
Silently "correcting" input can be really annoying. For example, my SO's first name has multiple capitals, and some forms "helpfully" split it into two words and the first name gets cut. If I know that, I can spell it without the capitals, but sometimes it doesn't let me know and I need to call in to get it fixed.
Oh I was talking about trimming an email, if it wasn't clear. Spaces are not valid characters so there is really no situation where they should happen. I do agree with you that an explicit message telling the user there is invalid input might be more appropriate, but if you know the correction to apply, I'd still apply it automatically ("hey we noticed you had spaces and we removed them; click here to keep them" or something)
Right, and trim is for the beginning and end. FUTO Keyboard will put spaces after periods, so it'll frequently try to enter something like
first. Last @domain.Com. The casing isn't an issue because emails (and all URLs) should be treated as case insensitive.I wouldn't expect a site to remove all whitespace, only leading and talking trailing whitespace, and then present an error if the email address is obviously invalid. There are libraries for this, and I think a simple regex would also be sufficient to catch most issues (search online for a vetted one).
Spaces are technically allowed before the @, provided you wrap it in quotes. That's incredibly rare and validating that is a bit of a pain, so I'd stick with making it an error instead of silently stripping what could be a valid, but unsupported, email address, since that would cause more confusion than an error.
I didn't know spaces were technically allowed before the @. TIL
Technically, but yeah, it's super rare, and most places don't support it.