What means Alphanumeric Validation?

[this_is_me]

Found it quite confusing that fields with "special characters" are rejected!
Éugene, Desirée, is not accepted as an alphanumeric entry. How can I validate this in a form field asking for a first name?
Österreich (Austria) is not accepted as a country...

Could you please recommend a solution?

[Jason Byrnes]

Alpha Numeric Validation will except all numbers and letters in the standard English alphabet. You would need to add characters such as Ö É é to the allow others list.

[Lon Winters]

I've run into issues with this also.

Is it better to just use the Required/Not Blank validation if you don't want to add all the special characters? Is there a downside doing it that way that I may be missing?

[SOJO web]

lon,

you definitely could use "required" with probably not too much downside... the only area I might not use "required" would be for something like password or username fields where I would want to ensure that it was absolutely an alphanumeric entry with no spaces... anything else, though, like names or other arbitrary input that cannot be validated someway else (i.e. email, numbers, etc.), I would use "required" instead.

Cheers,

Brian