this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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[–] SlopppyEngineer 220 points 2 months ago (3 children)

"We call her Carrie, because of the carriage return."

You can also try to give the child NULL as middle name for additional fun.

[–] [email protected] 168 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)
[–] [email protected] 85 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago

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.

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[–] neanderthal 28 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 170 points 2 months ago (22 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 71 points 2 months ago (2 children)

%20 is encoded space if I remember right, so even then they were already incorrect

[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 months ago

It sounds like maybe they sanitized the apostrophe to a space and then encoded it

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[–] MirthfulAlembic 47 points 2 months ago (5 children)
[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 158 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Whelks_chance 41 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This sounds like it would create a whole list of fun and irritating edge conditions for some poor bugger to debug. Love it.

[–] UnrepentantAlgebra 29 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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? 🤔

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[–] [email protected] 109 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's easy, just call it Jhon\nDoe

[–] riodoro1 75 points 2 months ago (4 children)

John\0Doe will fuck with all C (and C based derivatives) software that touches it.

[–] pelya 71 points 2 months ago

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"

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 2 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (6 children)

worst thing is, the regex to check email has been available for decades and it's fine with apostrophies

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

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.

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[–] AnyOldName3 76 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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 '.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Sounds like you did a thorough job as a QA tester. As a software engineer, I love to see it.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago

im sure the devs tasked at fixing that bug loved u ;-)

[–] Bookmeat 76 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (21 children)

Not legal in Canada. Your legal name must use Latin characters only. This is a sore point for indigenous people.

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

What's the answer? I need the link

Edit: I found it

[–] [email protected] 62 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

No, cause "John\nDoe" messes up my regex. Sorry, out of the question. I'm not good with regex.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (4 children)

no one is "good" with regex.

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[–] perviouslyiner 59 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Just noticed that the listing for ; DROP TABLE "COMPANIES"; -- LTD has been redacted by the government website‽

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sibling of Bobby Drop Tables

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 months ago (9 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Can I kill someone who wants to do this? How do I legally get away with it?

[–] LavenderDay3544 29 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Plead permanent sanity. If I was the judge I would let you go.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'd rather include a bell character '\a'

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago

And that's why you're not safe for work.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago (8 children)

If elected president my first order of business will be to make all birth certificates fully unicode compatible.

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[–] clutchtwopointzero 49 points 2 months ago

C programmers would ask whether a null-terminated name would be acceptable

[–] [email protected] 47 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ask Robert'); DROP TABLE Students; 's mum how it went.

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[–] PanoptiDon 45 points 2 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Frontend devs hates this guy.

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[–] Valmond 34 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I want the char 8 that makes a beep.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

NaN,
Not a Number, and now Not a Name

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[–] takeheart 23 points 2 months ago (13 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago

John
(long pause)
Doe

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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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