We have now decided on a bug for our team's project to pursue in hopes of resolving an issue with ticket #2485. The link leads to a description of the bug, telling interested users about an Unconfirmed bug(?) where students using the Sugar software were able to enter leading and trailing white space before entering a username. Our team member Jordan has already come upon a solution to the problem; since the code is written in Python, we will use the .strip() command to shrink the username to the remaining text.
Just after e-mailing the developers about this potential problem, Walter Bender, one of the lead developers, replied both in a comment to the bug and in an e-mail to the developers list:
"Be careful here: some students are using the name field to input a multi-line emoticon graphic as their name. I don't worry too much about white-space in single-line names, but it could matter in a multi-line name."
An emoticon (i.e. the smiley face graphics commonly seen in forums) does present a problem in using the .strip() Python command. Any options in the .strip(<option>) command are for characters only. Somehow, these students have been able to place graphics into the supposed text-only box and we need a solution as to how to either remove the use of emoticons or convert the graphic to its text equivalent (that way the .strip() command can remove the white space present in multiple lines).
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