Name format¶

A valid name consists only of ASCII letters and numbers, period, underscore and hyphen. It must start and end with a letter or number. This means that valid project names are limited to those which match the following regex (run with re.IGNORECASE):

^([A-Z0-9]|[A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9._-]*[A-Z0-9])\Z

Name normalization¶

The name should be lowercased with all runs of the characters ., -, or _ replaced with a single - character. This can be implemented in Python with the re module:

import re

def normalize(name):
    return re.sub(r"[-_.]+", "-", name).lower()

This means that the following names are all equivalent:

• friendly-bard (normalized form)

• Friendly-Bard

• FRIENDLY-BARD

• friendly.bard

• friendly_bard

• friendly--bard

• FrIeNdLy-._.-bArD (a terrible way to write a name, but it is valid)

History¶

• September 2015: The specification of name normalized was approved through 503.

• November 2015: The specification of valid names was approved through 508.

• August 2025: The suggested name validation regex was fixed to match the field specification (it previously finished with $ instead of \Z, incorrectly permitting trailing newlines)