The main representation for a user is found in the users directory within the Corpus instance. The users directory is an instance of UserList, and its members are instances of User.
The permissions system has its own user information, contained in the GroupsFile object. See Permissions.
The primary constraint that is placed on user names is that they be suitable for use as a filename component. They must not contain slash or dot. There is a general expectation that they contain only ASCII letters, digits, or underscore. Nevertheless, when using a user name as part of a URL, it is safest to hex-encode it.
The Environment method user takes a username and returns an instance of either User or UnknownUser. Both classes provide the following members and method:
One can use the new_child() method of UserList to add new Users.
For general information about romanizations and registries, see Romanization.
A Romanization is a mapping from 7-bit ASCII strings to Unicode strings.
A ReadOnlyRomanization behaves the same, except that it signals an error if one tries to set an entry.
A Registry is a specialization of Directory that contains Romanizations. The following methods are useful: