Yes, all these forms should handle existing names...
but the author's own website doesn't (url: xn--stpie-k0a81a.com, bottom of the page: "© 2024 ę ń. All rights reserved.")
Charset="WTF-8"
121–130 of 463 posts
Re: Charset="WTF-8"
#122As someone who really think name field should just be one field with any printable unicode characters, I do wonder what the hell would I need to do if I take customer names in this form, and then my system has to interact with some other service that requires first/last name split, and/or [a-zA-Z] validation, like a bank or postal service.
Automatic transliteration seems to be very dangerous (wrong name on bank accounts, for instance), and not always feasible (some unicode characters have more than one way of being transliterated).
Should we apologize to the user, and just ask the user twice, once correctly, and once for the bad computer systems? This seems to be the only approach that both respects their spelling, and at the same time not creating potential conflict with other systems.
Re: Charset="WTF-8"
#123I lost count of the projects where this was an issue. US and Western European-born devs are oblivious to this problem and it ends up catching them over and over again.
Yeah, it's amazing. My language has a Latin-based alphabet but can't be represented with ISO 8859-1 (aka the Latin-1 charset) so I used to take it for granted that most software will not support inputs in the language... 25 years ago. But Windows XP shipped with a good selection of input methods and used UTF-16, dramatically improving things, so it's amazing to still see new software created where this is somehow a problem.
Except that now there's no good excuse. Things like the name in the linked article would just work out of the box if it weren't for developers actually taking the time to break them by implementing unnecessary and incorrect validation.
I can think of very few situations, where validation of names is actually warranted. One that comes to mind is when you need people's ICAO 9303 compliant names, such as on passports or airline systems. If you need to make sure you're getting the name the person has in their passport's MRZ, then yes, rejecting non-ASCII characters is correct, but most systems don't need to do that.
Re: Charset="WTF-8"
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is though that payment networks do in fact do instant verification and it is interesting what gets verified and when. At gas stations it is very common to ask for a zip code (again US), and this is verified immediately to allow the transaction to proceed. I’ve found that when a street address is asked for there is some verification and often a match on the house number is sufficient. Zip codes are verified…
At American gas stations, if you have a Canadian credit card, you type in 00000 because Canadians don't have ZIP codes.
Are we sure they don't actually validate against a more generic postal code field? Then again some countries have letters in their postcodes (the UK comes to mind), so that might be a problem anyways.
Re: Charset="WTF-8"
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got curious if I can get data to answer that, and it seems so. Based on xlsx from [0], we got the following ??d? localities in Poland: 1 x Bądy, 1 x Brda, 5 x Buda, 120 x Budy, 4 x Dudy, 1 x Dydy, 1 x Gady, 1 x Judy, 1 x Kady, 1 x Kadź, 1 x Łada, 1 x Lady, 4 x Lądy, 2 x Łady, 1 x Lęda, 1 x Lody, 4 x Łódź, 1 x Nida, 1 x Reda, 1 x Redy, 1 x Redz, 74 x Ruda, 8 x Rudy, 12 x Sady, 2 x Zady, 2 x Żydy Certainly quite a lo…
Interesting! However, assuming that ASCII characters are always rendered correctly and never as "?", it seems like the only solution for "??d?" would be one of the four Łódźs?
Sounds like someone is getting ready for Advent of Code!
Re: Charset="WTF-8"
#126A system not supporting non-latin characters in personal names is pitiful, but a system telling the user that they have an invalid name is outright insulting.
That’s the best one of the lot. "Dein Name ist ungültig", "Your name is invalid", written with the informal word for "your".
Re: Charset="WTF-8"
#127I'll say it again: this is the consequence of Unicode trying to be a mix of html and docx, instead of a charset. It went too far for an average Joe DevGuy to understand how to deal with it, so he just selects a subset he can handle and bans everything else. HN does that too - special symbols simply get removed.
Unicode screwed itself up completely. We wanted a common charset for things like latin, extlatin, cjk, cyrillic, hebrew, etc. And we got it, for a while. Shortly after it focused on becoming a complex file format with colorful icons and invisible symbols, which is not manageable without cutting out all that bs by force.
Re: Charset="WTF-8"
#128Yes, all these forms should handle existing names... but the author's own website doesn't (url: xn--stpie-k0a81a.com, bottom of the page: "© 2024 ę ń. All rights reserved.")
I think the bottom of the page is you missing the joke. It's showing only the name letters that get rejected everywhere else. Similarly for the URL, the URL renders his name correctly when you browse to it in a modern browser. What you've copied is the canonical fallback for unicode.
Re: Charset="WTF-8"
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't validate names, use transliteration to make them safe for postal services (or whatever). In SQL this is COLLATE, in the command line you can use uconv: >echo "'Lódź'" | uconv -f "UTF-8" -t "UTF-8" -x "Latin-ASCII" >'Lodz'
Yeah, that'll work great.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Celje echo "Čelje" | uconv -f "UTF-8" -t "UTF-8" -x "Latin-ASCII" > "Celje" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celje (i mean... we do have postal numbers just for problems like this, but both Štefan and Stefan are not-so-uncommon male names over here, so are Jozef and Jožef, etc.)
Most places where telling Štefan from Stefan is a problem use postal numbers for people too, or/and ask for your DOB.
Re: Charset="WTF-8"
#130Under GDPR you have the legal right for your name to be stored and processed with the correct spelling in the EU. https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=Court_of_Appeal_of_Brusse...
This seems to only apply to banks.
This does not only apply to banks. The specific court case was brought against a bank, but the law as is applies to any and everyone who processes your personal data.