There are a frightening number of systems that don’t allow “-”, which isn’t even an edge case. A lot of people - mostly women - hyphenate their last names on marriage, rather than throw their old name away. My wife did. She legally changed her name when she came of age, and when we met and married years later she said, “I paid for money for my name; I’m not letting it go.” (Note: I wasn’t pressuring her to take my name.) So she hyphenated it, and has come to regret the decision. She says she should have switched, or not, but the hyphen causes problems everywhere. It’s not a legal character in a lot of systems, including some government systems.
I have an apostrophe and it’s super annoying as some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.
So I’ve received ID with Mc%20dole or they add a space in it. Or I’ll get a work email with an apostrophe but I cant use it anywhere because sites have it disabled. And I’ve missed my flight because I changed my ticket once to add the apostrophe and the system just broke at the gate.
Worse yet many flight companies have “you will not be able to board if your ID doesn’t exactly reflect your details” but their form doesn’t allow it. Even most forms for card payments don’t allow it even though it’s the name on my card.
Always worth posting this classic.
I have an apostrophe and it’s super annoying as some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.
My surname contains a character that’s only present in the Polish alphabet. Writing my full name as is broke lots of systems, encoding, printed paperwork and even British naturalisation application on Home Office website. My surname was part of my username back at uni, and everytime I tried to login on Windows, it would crash underlying LDAP server, logging everyone in the classroom out and forcing ICT to restart the server.
everytime I tried to login on Windows, it would crash underlying LDAP server, logging everyone in the classroom out and forcing ICT to restart the server.
Now that’s the way to do it! Make it everybody’s problem, not just yours.
you will not be able to board if your ID doesn’t exactly reflect your details"
Do they care about an apostrophe though? I can see any punctuation being a problem for systems.
I had to convince people to let me on board a plane because my name contain a swedish letter (å). Their computer system translated it into “aa”, which then didn’t match my passport.
Your name is transliterated in your passport? That’s on the Swedish authorities then.
No, my passport has my real name of course, with “å”. In the airport system and on the boarding pass my name was spelled with “aa”.
asking questions like this is how i found out that one of the allowed characters in names in my country is ÿ, which is fine in Latin-1 but in 7-bit ASCII is
DEL.This sounds like it would create a whole list of fun and irritating edge conditions for some poor bugger to debug. Love it.
“We call her Carrie, because of the carriage return.”
You can also try to give the child NULL as middle name for additional fun.
someone tried that with their license plate, it turned out well: https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/
edit: archive link
Oh no, it gets worse:
Prank or not, Tartaro was playing with fire by going with NULL in the first place. “He had it coming,” says Christopher Null, a journalist who has written previously for WIRED about the challenges his last name presents. “All you ever get is errors and crashes and headaches.”
Archive link: https://archive.ph/o/Foe1r/https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/
He is being too nice. He needs to get a lawyer and sue that shitty company for harassment and whatever else.
ETA: The US isn’t overly litigious. We are under litigious if anything.
