Initial Solution

I write this post in hope to stop my future self from doing this again. Sometimes I waste a few hours to find an implementation for something because I don’t like my first draft, or it should do more. The result is always the same: Whatever that first draft was.

A few weeks ago I was implementing “slugs” for something. Slugs in my case are where individual pages live, for example https://example.com/user/thisistheslug. My first draft was to allow a-z, A-Z, 0-9, - and _.

Then I thought: This world has more than just the English language. What if I allow more. This led me down a hole of what is a valid URL-part and not. Slugs, in my case, are also used for the from address when users send out their newsletters. So on top of what is allowed in URLs I also had to figure out if that holds true for the local-part of an email address (the part in front of the @).

All in all I think I spent a good 3 hours looking at various StackOverflow answers, RFCs, Wikipedia entries and more. Until I decided, you know what…no. Lets just do a-z A-Z 0-9 - _.

This is a mistake I keep making. Lets hope by writing it down my brain learns to flag this behavior and alerts me the next time I am doing this.