"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
I just realized that the shitty software on the other side of the divide is casting null to ”null", which absolutely explains that issue. What a cluster
Yeah, I love to rag on languages with weak typing, because of the potential for a bug, but seeing it play out in reality, directly with user input, that's certainly something else.
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.
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.
%20 is encoded space if I remember right, so even then they were already incorrect
It sounds like maybe they sanitized the apostrophe to a space and then encoded it
Always worth posting this classic.
There's also the version with examples if you want to know exactly what and why it breaks.
And the git that collects all of these in one place, if you want to really nerd out.
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.
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.
If someone else has to debug the problems caused by a parent naming their child with a special character, does that make the parent the bugger? 🤔
That's easy, just call it Jhon\nDoe
John\0Doe will fuck with all C (and C based derivatives) software that touches it.
Nah, it will end up simply as "John" in the database. You need "John%sDoe" to crash C software with unsafe printf() calls, and even then it's better to use several "%s"
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.
It boggles my mind how so many websites and platforms incorrectly say my e-mail address is 'invalid' because it has an apostrophe in it.
No. It is NOT invalid. I have been receiving e-mails for years. You just have a shitty developer.
worst thing is, the regex to check email has been available for decades and it's fine with apostrophies
Once I was tasked with doing QA testing for an app which was planned to initially go live in the states of Georgia and Tenessee. One of the required fields was the user's legal name. I therefore looked up the laws on baby names in those two states.
Georgia has simple rules where a child's forename must be a sequence of the 26 regular Latin letters.
Tenessee seemed to only require that a child's name was writable under some writing system, which would imply any unicode code point is permissible.
At the time, I logged a bug that a hypothetical user born in Tenessee with a name consisting of a single emoji couldn't enter their legal name. I reckon it would also be legal to call a Tenessee baby 'John '.
Sounds like you did a thorough job as a QA tester. As a software engineer, I love to see it.
im sure the devs tasked at fixing that bug loved u ;-)
Not legal in Canada. Your legal name must use Latin characters only. This is a sore point for indigenous people.
No, cause "John\nDoe" messes up my regex. Sorry, out of the question. I'm not good with regex.
Just noticed that the listing for ; DROP TABLE "COMPANIES"; -- LTD has been redacted by the government website‽
Can I kill someone who wants to do this? How do I legally get away with it?
If elected president my first order of business will be to make all birth certificates fully unicode compatible.
Not legal in Sweden. Our "IRS" must also accept the name and deem it legal.
I for one like this. As it stops some very stupid people to name their children some very stupid names. Such as "Adolf Hitler".
And yes. Someone did try to name their child this and they were appropriately stoped from doing it.
I'd rather include a bell character '\a'
And that's why you're not safe for work.
C programmers would ask whether a null-terminated name would be acceptable
Na, names are about pronunciation (how you call someone). Written letters are an approximation of that. You can't pronounce a newline, so there's that.
John
(long pause)
Doe
It's impossible to represent that on paper. It could be misrepresented as a specific number of spaces. Depending on the position on the paper, it may also be hard to tell if the carriage return comes with the line feed. Unless you want the document to be in ASCII or EBCDIC hex, it's like writing an ambiguous math problem where the answer is different depending on how you were taught about the order of operations. Don't do this to your kid, Abcde.
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