Non-Latin characters in FTP username

Question

I tried to find the list of characters allowed in the username for FTP, but the RFC is not very specific. What ftp servers and clients support Unicode usernames? Special symbols? Is there a generally accepted specification that explains the list of characters allowed in FTP user names? (googling didn't help me)

Answer 1

RFC 959 5.3.2:

<username> ::= <string> <string> ::= <char> | <char><string> <char> ::= any of the 128 ASCII characters except <CR> and <LF> 

Later RFCs (for example, the proposed RFC 3659 standard) talk about UTF-8 extensions, but only in the context of paths and encoding of file contents.

Thus, you can depend only on ASCII, but in practice I suspect that most clients and servers support UTF-8.

Answer 2

Try encoding with UTF-8 because most FTP servers will work with UTF-8.