Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, never. You are considered the bug, not their system.
I'd consider it more of an edgecase than a bug.
If you do that, then we will consider you an edgelord.
I couldn't debug the code because of my name
171–180 of 300 posts
Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name
#172Very similar problem to one described started my exodus from Google services. I also have non-latin characters in my name however I knew it was always an issue so I never used it in paths etc. At some point, long time ago, I was tasked to do some maintance with Google Cloud service (can't remember the name of the service now) which was doable only through Python CLI utility and it failed with very similar Python erro…
> the best course of action would be to change my name As someone who has been told this, for other reasons, I empathize. My reaction has always been - "Your system can't even handle names, you need to fix it". Edit: I wish there was a library / service that helped you handle all sorts of edge cases in names, so that you don' t have to worry about it. Just use a user-id, and set / get a name from a lib / service that…
I believe that library / service is called UTF-8.
These days everything should be stored as bare UTF-8 data (or utf8mb4 if you're MySQL) and presented without anything else. Don't parse it, don't slice-and-dice it, don't prepend or append titles or honorifics or suffixes, don't make assumptions about length or content beyond "must be > 0 as a whole" and DEFINITELY don't use it as an identifier. Treat it as a non-unique opaque token and you'll be fine greater than 99% of the time.
There are people with no last name. There are people with two or three or twelve middle names. There are people with a number for a last name. There are people with a symbol for their entire name.
Take what they give you and use it and be done with it.
Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's not his name. Imagine you are John but you had to make do with Yohn because the people designing you software didn't need the letter J...
It's not strange to localize your name. In ASL for example, you could sign your English name letter-by-letter, but it's much more common to have a totally new sign for your name - usually a word combined with the first letter of your name. Taking part in a different system often means taking on another name.
> It's not strange to localize your name.
That reminds me that I was talking once to the guy who turn Mikołaj name into Mikowhy pseudonym
Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is blaming the victim
No it's not. It's not even remotely victim blaming. At no point did anyone even remotely hint it was their fault. People have taken this to a ridiculous level. Giving practical advice about how to avoid problems is not blaming the victim. Telling my child to look both ways before crossing the street is not blaming him if he gets hit. It's not wanting to see him get hurt when the person actually at fault fucks up. Tel…
The computer is supposed to make our lives better, we should not be required to make the computer’s (or programmers’) life better. Your attitude reminds me of the people in the 60s who included punch cards in the utility bills, marking them “DO NOT FOLD, SPLINDLE, OR MUTILATE” (it became a meme). Or the people in Spain who changed their alphabet to make it easier for computers to sort.
My name appears differently in my passport, on plane tickets (not always using the same modification), and my green card. And for the latter two I left out the part of my name that can’t properly be represented at all in ASCII. And you are saying that somehow I am at fault?
Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also important to width-test fields. Never forget to make sure that WWWWWWWWWWWW doesn't cause weird application wrapping.
I used a system where the maximum length on the "new password" field in the change password form was longer than the password field in the login form. The symptom was that I could login if I used my password manager browser plugin, but not if I pasted it from my password manager.
Not fully related but you reminded me of this.
Around the time of AOL3 or early AOL4 someone found a user name exploit.
When making a new account, on the client side use winapi's EM_LIMITTEXT to bypass the max character limit on the input textbox. Enter one or two letters, a bunch of spaces, then some more letters.
The server side would truncate to the original length, leaving you with a one or two letter username, working around the 3+ requirement.
Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name
#176>When I found out that the bug was in the Rider itself, I reported it to technical support. I also found a similar report for PyCharm. Unfortunately, things haven’t moved forward since then.
Unfortunately, typical with Jetbrains.
Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name
#177Very similar problem to one described started my exodus from Google services. I also have non-latin characters in my name however I knew it was always an issue so I never used it in paths etc. At some point, long time ago, I was tasked to do some maintance with Google Cloud service (can't remember the name of the service now) which was doable only through Python CLI utility and it failed with very similar Python erro…
A Polish relative of mine used to just gave an arbitrary substitute name (e.g. "Dave Smith") for restaurant reservations, because even if they could write his last name, they wouldn't be able to pronounce it. My sibling has a name that has an accent, and just enters it with the plain letter most of the time. The name was once rare and "ethnic", but became popular a generation later so people know how to pronounce it…
a friend of mine has that problem. his company is owned by his wife because his name can't appear in legal documents and he refuses to change it. his approach was that he petitioned unicode to include that character.
i don't think the authorities are actively trying to eliminate those characters but simply don't want to go through the effort to track down and have those characters added to the standard. the process takes years and in the mean time you have to live with the inconvenience. also most of the people faced with the problem would not even know how.
Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Python 3 usually handles this correctly, and I'm a little bit confused what's going on in the article, exactly. For UNIX path names (and other OS data like environment variables), Python uses the "surrogateescape" error handling method, which does exactly what you ask. Any byte sequence can be converted to a string. If it decodes as valid UTF-8, it will do that. If it hits a byte that does not decode as valid UTF-8 (…
The incorrect docker-compose file was generated by Java (Jetbrains) but consumed by Python (docker-compose). The GP comment was complaining about Python's strict Unicode consumption, not Java's invalid Unicode generation.
Oh, I see. But if it was UTF-8 it would have worked... I guess the problem is that JetBrains is generating the file in (e.g.) Windows-1252, and Python needs to be told that?
Does it work if you set the environment variable PYTHONENCODING to cp1252?
(I suppose I should either contact the author, or try it myself...)
Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name
#179Fun fact: If you have the exclamation mark (!) in your Windows username, Java will think it's the jar separator and `getResourceAsStream` will refuse to work. This broke many people's Minecraft installation over the years. The bug in question [0] was reported in 2001 and remains unsolved 20 years later. [0] https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4523159
The only practical fix would be to ban ! in usernames.
Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name
#180In CS, most algorithms assume an ASCII character set. I wonder if there's any string-related algorithms that completely break (functionally or complexity wise) when given UTF-16 or UTF-8 character sets