C programmers would ask whether a null-terminated name would be acceptable
I’m not american and I’m glad I’m not but intended if someone could enter a bunch of zero width spaces
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 stone 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 '.
im sure the devs tasked at fixing that bug loved u ;-)
Sounds like you did a thorough job as a QA tester. As a software engineer, I love to see it.
Little Bobby Tables
No, cause “John\nDoe” messes up my regex. Sorry, out of the question. I’m not good with regex.
no one is “good” with regex.
why settle for \n when you can go for the stylish carriage return
so
John\r Doe? depending on the software, when it gets printed, the carriage return will moves the cursor to the start of the line without moving a line down, becoming\x20Doe.¿Porqué no los dos? A nice \r\n, Windows style.
Gotta band it Windows tho, it just feels right, I want to enjoy my fake typewriter
Can I kill someone who wants to do this? How do I legally get away with it?
Plead permanent sanity. If I was the judge I would let you go.
Of myself of the now dead purpetrator?
Thanks bro
I gotchu
Sibling of Bobby Drop Tables
Y’all need to learn how to sanitize your inputs!
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.
Just pronounce \n as a glottal stop.
But differently spelled names are legally distinct.
i think they mean that pronounciation matters for determing validity, not for the actual record or distinguishing between names
But that doesn’t really address the original question, does it? You don’t have to pronounce all the letters in a name, so the fact that you can’t pronounce a newline isn’t sufficient to demonstrate that it can’t be part of a name.
John
(long pause)
DoeBut something has to be written on the birth certificate and social security card, and that’s what everything else will expect you to use. I think just due to technical limitations (e.g. of the printer/template for those things) it wouldn’t be allowed, but I dunno about legally
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.
ugh literally 1984
If only Sweden invaded the rest of the world instead of Russia… *le sigh*
I accept our new Scandinavian overlords. But I would rather have it be Finland.
Akchtually, Finland is not a Scandinavian country properly.
Fuck that, we think it is in the US. And we’re the only people who matter on the internet.
Eh, if they went imperial they would be subject to imperial needs leading to all the usual imperial problems.
What, inconsistent units? /s
Should have went with Adolf Olivernipples
A line break is a non-printable character. So it would only work in the scope of electronic storage. The minute it hits other media, the line break character is subject to how that media handles it’s presence, and then it is lost permanently from that step forward.
Plus, many input forms make use of validation that will just trim anything that isn’t a character or number, removing the line break character.
As someone with a very mildly unusual name, I can tell you that it doesn’t matter whether a system could or could not meaningfully represent the name. Often the people or systems just refuse to acknowledge any deviation from what’s expected. Sometimes databases are written to enforce arbitrary grammatical rules that make my name impossible to write, or the people using the systems will just “correct” the “error” without telling me. I don’t mind that much but our normative systems just love to homogenise us.
Because sadly we live in a society, and normal names are required for the functioning of society.
No they’re not. They’re required for us to be catalogued and managed by a state, to our detriment and the enrichment of the ruling class.
“Normality” is a fucking scam that keeps your imagination in check, so you never look outside your assigned box and realise you don’t have to belong to anyone.
You have no idea how much genocidal violence has been done to condition our society to accept a dystopic phrase like “normal names are required for the functioning of society”.
Your mind has been caged.
You’re right.
I just want to say that my last name is three syllables and spelled exactly how it sounds. In fact it’s two common english words stuck together. It was Americanized/Anglicized from Germany.
Three syllables will break brains on people here. I state it clearly. They’re like haha what?
For the last 9 years I’ve just been handing over my work ID badge so they can type it.
I probably said it too dramatically, the kinds of people that need to hear it will just knee-jerk dismiss me, but seriously think about the phrase “normal names are required for the functioning of society”. What a wild-ass thing to say. Required why? Is society really that fragile? Sounds like maybe it should be replaced by something that can handle the occasional mildly spicy letter. Mine isn’t even that spicy, it’s like whole-egg-mayo levels of spice.
It’s hard to believe but it’s just a couple people being shitty. Many probably agree sadly, but damn, get with it people !
I understand all the crashes database, Bobby Tables arguments. But shit, just update your system to accept Unicode and we’ll live happily ever after. At least my child 🍆💦ヾ(⌐■_■)ノ♪ will be finally recognized. 🤙
That’s a beautiful name.
A line break doesnt have to be electronic only. You just… start a new line on the paper.
If it were somehow legally allowed, the sanitization would be incorrect.
Not legal in Canada. Your legal name must use Latin characters only. This is a sore point for indigenous people.
Hello my name is JohnDoe. My name only contains Latin characters, no spaces allowed.
Ah, but you see, “John” and “Doe” are two names - first and last - and when you say “My name is”, you’re really listing out your names, with spaces inbetween!
But then there’s hyphenated names, and I have no idea how those are treated.
"John Doe"vs["John", "Doe"]vs{"firstName":"John", "lastName":"Doe"}console.log(Object.values(name).join("\n"));
Could be…“Jondo” like, a mononym hahaha.
The Romans also had spaces in between words
I was under the impression that that was actually a medieval invention
This comment made me learn. Thank you.
What was used to delineate words before the space character, then?
Nothing but understanding of words and sentences. It was kind of a whole thing. The space character was revolutionary to increasing the spread of literacy. Relevant
Or for those that just want to read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua
But did they have lowercase?
EDIT: Hello my name is JOHN DOE. Only latin characters allowed
But did they have
lowercaseenglish language?Salve! John Doe nomen meum est.
Only latin
charactersallowed(That’s all the latin I remember from school back then)
Which is both entirely understandable, and also tragic because Canada’s indigenous written characters are so cool. :D
But also, it’s gotta be neat having a name among your people, that “the state” has nothing to do with…
Did the Romans not use line breaks?
No, they didn’t even use the space to separate words. Take a look at any Roman inscription in Italy, there are no spaces between the words (just like there are no silent pauses between spoken words).
Blank spaces arent characters by definition as they’re the space that allows the letters to exist
Deep. Is Python a form of Jazz?
Yes, and YAML is a war crime.
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.
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.
I have an apostrophe
Scottish/Irish?
some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.
Which kind of apostrophe?
A straight apostrophe, fine - that can and does get used in valid SQL injection attacks. I would be disgusted at any input form that didn’t sanitize that.
But a curly apostrophe? Nothing should be filtering a curly apostrophe, as it has no function or use within SQL. So if you learn how to bring that up in alt codes (Windows, specifically), Key combos (Mac) or dead keys (Linux), as well as direct Unicode codes for most any Win/Mac/*Nix platform, you should be golden.
Unless the developer of that input form was a complete moron and made extra-tight validation.
Plus, knowing the inputs for a lot of extended UTF-8 characters not found on a normal keyboard is also a wee bit of a typing superpower.
%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.
This is going to be bobby tables isn’t it?
Edit: It wasn’t?!
Also relevant: https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/
Spent lots of effort to get names for my kids that avoid this. Swedish/French. It’s harder than it sounds.
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.
That one I can actually see, having an extra letter that doesn’t match. Dropped punctuation or symbols (whatever the flair is called) though personally I wouldn’t care.
That’s the wrong way of looking at an å.
It’s not just an a with decoration. It actually has different pronunciation and is typically replaced with aa if no å is available. (I’m neither Swedish nor Norwegian, so not 100% sure, but it’s what happened to Erling Haaland).
Similarly, you would replace a German ä with ae. So if my name was Bäcker, it would be wrong to spell it Backer on a ticket. Baecker would be the way.
Yes I’m aware it’s not an a with decoration jfc. I’m saying for computer entries that garble things, I wouldn’t care about matching it up so perfectly (with dropped whatever those things are called) as to not allow someone to board a plane.
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”.
I’m amazed that none of your family members have run into the same problem. If I were you I would compare passports with my family.
… why are you putting an apostrophe in McDole? The O-apostrophe in Irish names is an anglicisation of Ó, eg. Ó Briain becomes O’Brien. Mac Dól would become MacDole/McDole.
Yeah fuck this guy for spelling his name the way it was given to him what an asshole
Probably some bureaucrat decades ago making an incorrect assumption that passed down through generations. Happened to my family. No Irish roots whatsoever, yet somehow we ended up with the annoying form-breaking apostrophe in our ‘legal’ name just because it begins with the letter ‘o’.
“Oscar??? Surely, you’re mistaken. I hereby decree your name to be O’Scar!” ~Arsehole circa 1937
Yep also happened to my family. There is a y in my family name, but that’s very uncommon in the Netherlands, my last name is of French origin. So some bureaucrat changed it to a Dutch y which is an ij and there was no time to correct it since my grandparents had to catch the boat to flee the former Dutch colony. Now my last name is constantly pronounced wrong. I’m probably going to change it in the future but in the Netherlands you are not allowed to change your name except for a few exceptions. And applying for a name change cost a lot of money and you won’t get it back if they reject it. So I probably have to get a lawyer to do it.
Yeah, I’ve considered a name change myself. Decided not to bother as it would mean every time I need to prove my identity to a government organisation I’d need to provide additional change of name documentation.
Government is hard enough to deal with as it is without adding an extra thing that needs to be assessed.
Hey Militant Left, just because every question directed at you assumes you are an asshole, doesn’t mean the same applies to questions to other people
Mc’Dole is what they said, not McDo’le.
If elected president my first order of business will be to make all birth certificates fully unicode compatible.
Howdy friend, I’m ▒⟪♶⳽Ⰶ⮫☲Ⰱ∓✑ⲍ␝ⅼⓑ⊯⛝≋ⱚⵯ⿳➡⸷⋘⎋⛏⍫⣺⨼⛜⧄ⅈ⎥⦶⋣⩥⮯⨏⼧⁹⟤.
Oh, poor thing. It must be terrible to be one of insufferable Elon Musk’s progeny
(ノ-_-)ノ~┻━┻ Miller
How is your son
X Æ A-12?Screw everything about Elon musk
“It sounds like a password”
Y̴̥͉͕͌̀ǫ̴̗̅̕u̵̱̾̋͐̚ ̷̡͕͈͛̇h̴̳̱̘̆ä̶̼́̕ṽ̷̬͕è̷͓̰̔̌ ̸̪͋m̷͍͎͙̂́̔ͅy̷̰̘̎́̉ͅ ̷̳͒v̷̭̕o̷̢͚̟͇͒̃͐̕t̴̪̙͗̐͆́ë̶̦͗ ̵̗͌̅p̶̰̫͛̑r̷̨͛̏̈́͝e̷͇͍̋̚͜s̸̳͙̒͘î̶̞̍̍̋͜ͅd̴̰̭͚̞͗ě̶̯̖n̶̩̿̕t̶͎͉̂ ̵̦͂̍̀Z̵̧̲̦̹̾͋a̴̒̑ͅl̷͇̘̝̬͒̊͝ǵ̴̹̣͖’̷͂͜o̴̢͔̱̔ò̷̧͛!̷̦̎͑͆͘ ̵̺̼̜̃̑
I govenment site I visited recenly made a point of how it accepts emojis in passwords!
Easy,
John\nDoeProbably have to escape it so it will work properly: John\/nDoe
\nalready is an escape sequence, consisting of\, the escape character, andn, the code that is responsible for the new line. Together they form an escape sequence.This person unicodes
