WordPress MU

In the Add Blog page, Blog Address field, does anyone know what characters are allowed?

Obviously A-Z, a-z, 0-9. But can we SAFELY use any of these:

-_~&+()[],.

Thank you kindly,
Elchanan

No, those characters are not allowed within urls.

We've talked about it previously:

http://trac.mu.wordpress.org/ticket/363

I believe this is the rfc that covers this:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1738.html

Thanks tdjcbe. At first your response surprised me, then I realized you probably meant that these characters (except hyphen) are not allowed in hostnames, not URLs. That way I understand your comment more clearly.

One distinction is between those who create blogs using subdomains, which are an element of hostnames and therefore where your comment is applicable, and those who create blogs using directories, where many more chanacters are allowed - basically any character than can be used in a file or directory name is allowed.

Since our installation uses directories, not subdomains, it "makes sense" to us that some of these characters be allowed. For example, the underscore and hyphen are used ubiquitously in filenames and such. For example, many WP plugin names contain hyphens.

But I can see that writing separate code to handle these 2 cases, subdomain- vs. directory-based blogs, would be a pain for the dev team and a misdirection of very valuable resources.

I appreciate the opportunity to think this through and gain clarity.

Thank you kindly,
Elchanan