Ask Robert’); DROP TABLE Students; 's mum how it went.
Ah, little Bobby Tables we call him
C programmers would ask whether a null-terminated name would be acceptable
“ethics aside” truly a starter for a qa
Frontend devs hates this guy.
Still better than Jennifer Null I guess
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.
It’s time to log off and get a vasectomy
Apparently no-one did it yet, so I’ll name my child +++ATH0
Anyone remember when Chrome had that issue with validating nested URL-encoded characters? Anyone for John%%80%80 Doe?
I’m not american and I’m glad I’m not but intended if someone could enter a bunch of zero width spaces
John
Doe, related to Derrick Nippl-e perhaps? (Fry and Laurie)
“We call her Carrie, because of the carriage return.”
You can also try to give the child NULL as middle name for additional fun.
Hey “java.lang.NullPointerException” can I borrow your pen?
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/
I just realized that the shitty software on the other side of the divide is casting
nullto ”null", which absolutely explains that issue. What a clusterYeah, 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.
shudders in NodeJS
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.
Large corporations are overly litigious. Individuals can’t afford to be litigious enough.
Yeah, this is his daughter
they should have just used rust smh
Ca\r\rie
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.
Same shit with American custom forms. On the one hand, they threaten you with Armageddon if you fill out the form incorrectly, on the other hand, they only allow plain letters, numbers, and a handful of special characters. Nobody there has the capacity of the mind that maybe a name cannot be correctly represented with that tiny subset of characters. So it is simply impossible to fill out that form without breaking the law. And it is a customs form, so they should know that people filling it out are most likely foreigners.
%20 is encoded space if I remember right, so even then they were already incorrect
Yep, the apostrophe would be %27
So Mc%27dole
It sounds like maybe they sanitized the apostrophe to a space and then encoded it
Always worth posting this classic.
Been there, seen that, had to deal with it. Now add the problem that there are people who don’t know their birth date or not even the f-ing year they were born in. And I’m not talking about someone from a lost tribe at the Amazonas.
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.
Also relevant: https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/
This is going to be bobby tables isn’t it?
Edit: It wasn’t?!
Lol I went through the exact same process.
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.
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.
“Diacritics” is the word you are looking for.
And unfortunately the kind of people who decide whether people get to board a plane do care about that stuff.
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.
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.
Spent lots of effort to get names for my kids that avoid this. Swedish/French. It’s harder than it sounds.
… 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.
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? 🤔
I can tell you that buggering is not how you become a parent.
How about featuring?
that’s amazing! Aren’t codecs fun
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”
C and C derivatives will be fine unless they’re fucking up encoding.
Which rarely, if ever, happens. Especially with US software.
With an address in 's-Hertogenbosch to help people who are lazy about escaping.
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.
There are also fringe externalities from this too. I have my mom’s last name for my middle name and my dad’s for my last name. But back in the 90s, my state would erroneously handle that scenario as having no middle name and both names hyphenated for a last name. I didn’t find this out until I turned 18 and tried to get a retail job and they wouldn’t hire me until it got fixed.
First I had to go to the Dept of Health and get a new birth certificate, then I had to do the same at the social security administration for a new social security card. Hours and hours over multiple days just so I could earn minimum wage folding and selling used clothing. Ironically, the name mixup never was a problem when I did taxes previously.
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
There are many regexes that validate email, and they usually aren’t compliant with the RFC, there are some details in the very old answer on SO. So, better not validate and just send a confirmation, than restrict and lock people out, imo
The article you just mentioned in the comments includes both a completely reasonable and viable regex and binary and library alternatives that are in most languages.
Reasonable and viable ≠ RFC compliant
This quote summarises my views:
There is some danger that common usage and widespread sloppy coding will establish a de facto standard for e-mail addresses that is more restrictive than the recorded formal standard.
Well, and remember: If in doubt, send them an e-mail. You probably want to do that anyways to ensure they have access to that mailbox.
You can try to use a regex as a basic sanity check, so they’ve not accidentally typed a completely different info into there, but the e-mail standard allows so many wild mail addresses, that your basic sanity check might as well be whether they’ve typed an
into there.The regexes are written to comply with RFC 5332 and 6854
They are well defined and you can absolutely definitively check whether an address is allowable or not.
Yeah, I’m just saying that the benefit of using such a regex isn’t massive (unless you’re building a service which can’t send a mail).
a@bis a syntactically correct e-mail address. Most combinations of letters, an @-symbol and more letters will be syntactically correct, which is what most typos will look like. The regex will only catch fringe cases, such as a user accidentally hitting the spacebar.And then, personally, I don’t feel like it’s worth pulling in one of those massive regexes (+ possibly a regex library) for most use-cases.
Yes! Hyphens and “+” are also legal, and while most will accept a dash, many don’t allow ‘+’. But it’s explicitly allowed in the spec!
Ugh and that happens a lot if your email domain has an even slightly unusual TLD too.
And you’d think a simple solution is just leave out the hyphen when you put you name in, but that can also lead to problems when the system is looking for a 100% perfect match.
And good luck if they need to scan the barcode on your ID.
Then the first part is interpreted (in the US, anyway) as a middle name, not as part of the last name. I did run into a recently married woman who did that: dropped her middle name, moved her last to the middle, and used her spouse’s last name.
More commonly, places that don’t take hyphens tend to just run the two names together: Axel-Smith becomes AxelSmith.
Programmers can be really dumb.
This kind of makes me want to name my kid Pascal-Case
As someone who’s mexican I encounter that more than one would think since I have 2 last names and it gets weird sometimes since I also have a middle name.
God, the French. My friend has two first names, two middle, and thankfully only one surname.
Something that could happen in Mexico for a name is Juan Maria as a first, Guillermo David as a middle and Gonzales De Mercado as a last name. Technically 7 words and totally a thing but not common at all, anymore at least.
My mom didn’t hyphenate, but she does include her maiden name when writing her full name, after her middle name. It never even occurred to me that that’s uncommon.
So she writes 4 names? Does she put her maiden and married names both in the “surname” field? Or middle and maiden together in the “middle name” field?
I have come across a shockingly large amount of people who not only have a hyphenated last name but also have a hypenated first name! Dealing with every new computer system is like a new adventure
You’d think by now Jean-Luc Picard would be a well known example and systems are able to deal with it.
