Revisit reg_scrub.val_ok

[briangerard]

The reg_scrub.val_ok method is pretty limited at present. It should allow for accented characters, for instance.

It would probably be worthwhile to see what well-vetted libraries are out there rather than rolling our own. This version was enough to get us safely out of the gate, but we should look at something more robust.

[aschrab]

It's not only the method that is a problem. The way that it's used also has problems.

A missing or invalid value will just be skipped when attempting to create the Member object. So invalid or missing values can be silently ignored and cause fields that come later in the __init__'s argument list to be misinterpreted as long as there are enough values to fill in all of the required fields.

I think checking for missing or invalid fields would be better handled in the Member class. There should be different rules about what's valid for different fields anyway.

I'd also move away from passing all of those fields as positional arguments to __init__, that makes for a really awkward interface. Either pass them as a dict, or create the object empty and then set the attributes.

[briangerard]

Yeah, I was planning on moving towards a per-field validation model. Like I said, this was in the interest of speed. :-) I like your idea of moving the field validation into the Member class, though. That sounds really promising.

Likewise on simplifying the Member instantiation. That was feeling pretty clunky. I'll file a new issue to track that bit, though.