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When your last name is Null, nothing works

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Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#21

Post by lores »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #17
lores wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any time "$var" is interpolated without check into an INSERT, and any maintainer finds it easier to just check for null as a string rather than ask a DB admin or committee to update the DB after a lot of red tape and risk assessment. So... very often.

Guess I’ll change my name to ‘;drop table customers then ;)

You can make a good case to spend time sanitising requests to avoid catastrophic failure, but the "null" problem is one that quickly becomes a lot of work and risk to fix after the fact, for no obvious benefit except what's seen as the pedantry of some nerd, so it gets ranked all the way at the back of the list... until someone named Null comes along, and probably still even then.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#24

Post by andrewmcwatters »

zenethian wrote: post #22

The number of times that a website rejects my first name because it has a hyphen in it, even in 2025, is astounding. I get told all manner of things by support staff, like "just leave it out" as if it's just not an important part of my name or anything.

Same, as someone with two middle names. Both scenarios are very common.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#25

Post by francisofascii »

CivBase wrote: post #15
robertlagrant wrote: post #3

Who's checking if a string matches "null" rather than is null!?

Plenty of systems represent all values as strings, and "null" is the obvious (although probably not the best ) way to represent a null value as a string.

Which systems do this? I could see situations where reading in a text file, you have might assume the value null is not the string "null". I am struggling to think of other situations.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#26

Post by [deleted] »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #17
lores wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any time "$var" is interpolated without check into an INSERT, and any maintainer finds it easier to just check for null as a string rather than ask a DB admin or committee to update the DB after a lot of red tape and risk assessment. So... very often.

Guess I’ll change my name to ‘;drop table customers then ;)

[deleted]

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#27

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

lores wrote: post #21
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess I’ll change my name to ‘;drop table customers then ;)

You can make a good case to spend time sanitising requests to avoid catastrophic failure, but the "null" problem is one that quickly becomes a lot of work and risk to fix after the fact, for no obvious benefit except what's seen as the pedantry of some nerd, so it gets ranked all the way at the back of the list... until someone named Null comes along, and probably still even then.

I disagree. If your system is failing to correctly type check strings during SQL interpolation, you should probably kill it with fire.

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#28

Post by [deleted] »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #19
robertlagrant wrote: post #3

Who's checking if a string matches "null" rather than is null!?

There’s a few condescending answers here. You will find this more common in weakly typed languages like PHP and VB and maaaaaybe JavaScript, where null == “null” will probably evaluate to true.

[deleted]

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#29

Post by andrewmcwatters »

great_wubwub wrote: post #20
AlotOfReading wrote: post #14

For many years, my mother's proper legal name on her birth certificate was the empty string. This wasn't usually a problem before computers as she'd go by a given name instead, even on government paperwork. She started having issues with systems being unable to process her information in the late 90s and early 2000s. Background checks would fail, passports couldn't be issued, and so on. She eventually had it changed,…

There must be an interesting backstory here. Did her parents deliberately not name her? Did they forget?

Ah yes! Little miss (indecipherable silence).

Re: When your last name is Null, nothing works

#30

Post by lores »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #27
lores wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make a good case to spend time sanitising requests to avoid catastrophic failure, but the "null" problem is one that quickly becomes a lot of work and risk to fix after the fact, for no obvious benefit except what's seen as the pedantry of some nerd, so it gets ranked all the way at the back of the list... until someone named Null comes along, and probably still even then.

I disagree. If your system is failing to correctly type check strings during SQL interpolation, you should probably kill it with fire.

I don't disagree... In most cases, it's not your system, though, it's someone else's.
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