“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 clustershudders in NodeJS
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.
Not legal in Canada. Your legal name must use Latin characters only. This is a sore point for indigenous people.
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…
C programmers would ask whether a null-terminated name would be acceptable
No, cause “John\nDoe” messes up my regex. Sorry, out of the question. I’m not good with regex.
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.
By the time the app was due to go live, we’d only reported bugs with the signup and login flows. This was misinterpreted as there only being issues with the signup and login flows, and the app launched on time. In reality, it was impossible to get past the login screen.
And then let me guess… Of course the QA testers get the blame, when in reality it’s either management or marketing that wanted to pushe the app out.
Blaming us would be too close to root-cause analysis for them even to consider. We weren’t normally QA testers, but they’d left it until too late to hire internal QA, so roped in the developers (us) from a SaaS vendor their app replied on as emergency QA.
im sure the devs tasked at fixing that bug loved u ;-)
why settle for \n when you can go for the stylish carriage return
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.
Be funny as fuck if Canada started extradition procedures when he landed
Apparently no-one did it yet, so I’ll name my child +++ATH0
Ask Robert’); DROP TABLE Students; 's mum how it went.
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.
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 crouch down to simulate moving to a lower line.
John <crouch> Doe
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.
Should have went with Adolf Olivernipples
ugh literally 1984
Can I kill someone who wants to do this? How do I legally get away with it?
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
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@b
is 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.