Special Characters in Usernames

Since nobody ever replies on posts here I’ll respond to my own.

SOLUTION:

Go to wp-includes/formatting.php

Find the function sanitize_user(). Essentially I just commented out every line except the first and last. That seems to do the trick, and usernames are now allowed with special characters like ampersands, commas, hyphens, backslashes, etc.

Hope others find this helpful.

Hi sageleader
I need my users to be able to create usernames of numbers only.

Just to be sure; did you go FROM THIS:

function sanitize_user( $username, $strict = false ) {
$raw_username = $username;
$username = wp_strip_all_tags($username);
// Kill octets
$username = preg_replace(‘|%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])|’, ”, $username);
$username = preg_replace(‘/&.+?;/’, ”, $username); // Kill entities

// If strict, reduce to ASCII for max portability.
if ( $strict )
$username = preg_replace(‘|[^a-z0-9 _.\-@]|i’, ”, $username);

// Consolidate contiguous whitespace
$username = preg_replace(‘|\s+|’, ‘ ‘, $username);

return apply_filters(‘sanitize_user’, $username, $raw_username, $strict);
}

TO THIS:

function sanitize_user( $username, $strict = false ) {
$raw_username = $username;
/** $username = wp_strip_all_tags($username);
* // Kill octets
* $username = preg_replace(‘|%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])|’, ”, $username);
* $username = preg_replace(‘/&.+?;/’, ”, $username); // Kill entities
*
* // If strict, reduce to ASCII for max portability.
* if ( $strict )
* $username = preg_replace(‘|[^a-z0-9 _.\-@]|i’, ”, $username);
*
* // Consolidate contiguous whitespace
* $username = preg_replace(‘|\s+|’, ‘ ‘, $username);
*/
return apply_filters(‘sanitize_user’, $username, $raw_username, $strict);
}

No I used double slashes instead: //