7 ms·

I have an apostrophe in my name and it causes allll sorts of issues like this. (Think Bobby Tables). To the point where I’m pretty convinced that the internet i

I have an apostrophe in my name and it causes allll sorts of issues like this. (Think Bobby Tables). To the point where I’m pretty convinced that the internet is going to wipe out apostrophes from people’s actual names. In fact I just omitted it in my most recent drivers license.

dhimes 7y ago
Holy crap- still? This was an issue on HN like 10 years ago or so and I thought the word got out to fix it.
- jagged-chisel 7y ago
  It was also an issue 10 years before that. You'd think the word would get out to fix it...
- wool_gather 7y ago
  Just because the engineers know that there's a tricky problem with input validation doesn't mean the business people want to take the time to solve it, unfortunately.
maaaats 7y ago
Ouch. I have a ü in my last name from family in a different country way back somewhere. It doesn't crash systems as much as an apostrophe would, but it's very good at showing encoding issues between systems.. It's not as big an issue as it used to be, at least. Before I've had online transactions failing because of a mismatch between my name (with ü), and the name on the card (with u). The systems seem more forgiving now, having handled that case or something. I also remember being a bit scared traveling to Japan many years ago, as we were told it was SOoo important that the names and everything matched to gain entry. And then the name on my ticket was completely mangled. But no one cared. Here's a SO post about someone with the last name Null: https://stackoverflow.com/q/4456438/923847 https://stackoverflow.com/q/4456438/923847
- kijin 7y ago
  The Japanese are quite used to mojibake [1], so they would've understood immediately that the mismatch between your ticket and passport was caused by encoding issues. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake
  - scbrg 7y ago
    Interestingly, I've had problems in Korea (Gimpo Airport) because my name contains an "ö", and the canonical spelling in the passport for this is "oe". This was cause for much confusion among the airport staff. I would have thought that people from CJK-countries were more understanding of encoding-to-latin weirdness than most, but apparently not.
    - z2 7y ago
      I think their understanding would be focused on the encoding for their language and a relatively narrow set of problems. I've encountered name issues in CJK countries that keep names in native encoding due to an assumption that full names fit within a couple of characters with no need for any spaces or punctuation. Some systems might be designed to be "accommodating" and take even up to 8 or 10 characters! There was one train system where my name had at least four different iterations through the tickets I collected, with different ordering of first and last names and truncating.
    - kijin 7y ago
      In defense of the Korean airport staff, they might have been more accommodating if the "ö" was completely and obviously broken, like "£‡�". Spelling it as "oe" makes it look like there are no encoding issues, in which case strict checking makes more sense. It's much easier to identify mojibake (they tend to be extremely obvious in CJK encodings) than to remember canonical spellings and other variations in a whole bunch of different languages. Airport staff probably know that "oe" and "œ" are interchangeable, but that's about it.
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  Diacritics are usually stripped in air travel. In Hungarian we have many letters with diacritics, but it is never a problem that the passport has them and the system doesn't.
adanto6840 7y ago
I too have an apostrophe in my name and experience the same thing. I've had people put it into their system as a comma, dash, space, and all sorts of weirdness despite my calling it out specifically. My experience has actually improved substantially in the last 10 years or so, and most of the government systems I encounter these days actually handle it properly (as well as handling suffix properly too). That said, I've somewhat recently started having trouble checking in for flights again -- I flew last month and it took the ticketing agent >20 minutes to find my reservation on both the outbound and return flights, even despite my providing the 'confirmation code' / itinerary email (we were checking bags & flying with infants, else I'd have done online check-in). It can be really frustrating -- though I'm hopeful it will continue improving and hopefully be a smoother experience by the time my kids are adults.
- marcoperaza 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, why not just omit the apostrophe for airline reservations then? I understand wanting your full, real name in many circumstances, but who cares about what the boarding pass says as long as you get to fly? I doubt the people checking ID would care about the missing apostrophe.
  - jobigoud 7y ago
    But ID checking is also done electronically at some checkpoints. If your ticket doesn't match your passport, your Visa, your Visa waiver, etc. you are going to be in trouble. That being said last time I went to the US the person booking the ticket swapped my first name and last name. Only the person at the baggage dropoff noticed it, and after much deliberation they suggested to leave it that way. I went through with no issues apart from not being able to register the mileage.
  - couchand 7y ago
    Practically speaking, that makes sense. Philosophically, it's abhorrent. Blaming the user is bad behavior in general. Expecting a person to alter their name to confirm to a poor software implementation is just wrong.
megous 7y ago
"I was not trying to do SQL injection, sir! My name is John Letme'or True"
pedrovhb 7y ago
For those unfamiliar with Bobby: https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
jccalhoun 7y ago
I have a hyphen in my first name that also causes problems. I love it when I put my name in and the web site say "invalid first name." Thanks mom and dad... What is worse is people who "fix" my name by moving the second half of my first name and making it part of my last name. I'm an adult. I know what my name is.
- speleding 7y ago
  I have a double first name, so I have a space in my first name. Many people / systems seem to think I accidentally put my middle name in the first name field and helpfully move or drop the second part. Putting a hyphen in (which is not really supposed to be there) typically fixes it, so I'm variously known with a hyphenated and non-hyphenated name. But it rarely causes issues.
- Avamander 7y ago
  I write very strongly-worded letters to those companies. Honestly, I wish someone publicly shamed all those stupid companies.
- an_openbook 7y ago
  In Quebec, composite first names (prénoms composés) like Marc-Antoine are pretty common, so there was nothing weird about my parents giving me such a name. And frankly, most webforms I had to fill out while living there accepted my name just fine. However, now that I've moved to the United States, it's been a bit of an annoyance.
LeonM 7y ago
My name is officially spelled as Léon. The letter e with an acute accent causes all sorts of UTF-8 encoding issues with many services, not just airliners. If you interpret the UTF-8 é (0xC3A9) as ASCII it becomes Ã (0xC3) + © (0xA9), so my name often comes out as 'LÃ©on'. Airlines make it worse, because they strip both characters during sanity checking, so my name comes out as 'Lon', which has caused me problems a couple of times as the name on my passport did not match the name on the ticket.
- deathanatos 7y ago
  > If you interpret the UTF-8 é (0xC3A9) as ASCII it becomes Ã (0xC3) + © (0xA9) As latin1 (ISO-8859-1) or Win-1252; ASCII doesn't have either Ã or ©. latin1 is the default for text, including HTML, if you don't specify in protocols such as HTTP (modulo some stupidity from the WHATWG where it might be Win-1252 instead) and Windows-1252 is the default encoding in Windows in the USA (at least, prior to the Unicode APIs being added. The old APIs probably still exist though…). So these codecs pop up a lot in places where people who don't know what they're doing end up touching text.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    I ran across some code once for descrambling data that had been incorrectly processed like that, which I found common in legal documents. It's an interesting problem, because strictly speaking, it's lossy, but you can use probabilities to figure out something plausible. You can decode/encode one thing as another, or you can decode/encode multiple times...
    - OkGoDoIt 7y ago
      Any chance you have a link? I’ve had implement solutions to this myself and it’s very tedious. If someone has built a more complete solution I would love to just use that instead
      - bulatb 7y ago
        This HN thread has some links and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103356
progval 7y ago
> the internet is going to wipe out apostrophes from people’s actual names Also seeing that with accentuated uppercase letters in French, even in nouns, because it's hard to type them on Windows. People still use accents in lowercase of course, but think that it's incorrect to use accents for uppercase letters, even when handwriting.
- pfortuny 7y ago
  It is obligatory in Spanish -using accents both in lower and upper cases...
- kurtisc 7y ago
  I only learned they do have the accents from your post. I was taught to omit them about a decade ago (as a second language).
xyst 7y ago
D'Von?
- rco8786 7y ago
  Nah, pretty common Irish last name
undersuit 7y ago
I did some research a few weeks back about why I have an apostrophe in my name. When the British conquered the Irish they started keeping records of the citizenry. The Ó used in Irish names to track descent was eschewed for O' in British record keeping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_name

dhimes 7y ago

Holy crap- still? This was an issue on HN like 10 years ago or so and I thought the word got out to fix it.

jagged-chisel 7y ago
It was also an issue 10 years before that. You'd think the word would get out to fix it...
wool_gather 7y ago
Just because the engineers know that there's a tricky problem with input validation doesn't mean the business people want to take the time to solve it, unfortunately.

maaaats 7y ago

Ouch. I have a ü in my last name from family in a different country way back somewhere. It doesn't crash systems as much as an apostrophe would, but it's very good at showing encoding issues between systems.. It's not as big an issue as it used to be, at least. Before I've had online transactions failing because of a mismatch between my name (with ü), and the name on the card (with u). The systems seem more forgiving now, having handled that case or something. I also remember being a bit scared traveling to Japan many years ago, as we were told it was SOoo important that the names and everything matched to gain entry. And then the name on my ticket was completely mangled. But no one cared. Here's a SO post about someone with the last name Null: https://stackoverflow.com/q/4456438/923847 https://stackoverflow.com/q/4456438/923847

kijin 7y ago
The Japanese are quite used to mojibake [1], so they would've understood immediately that the mismatch between your ticket and passport was caused by encoding issues. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake
- scbrg 7y ago
  Interestingly, I've had problems in Korea (Gimpo Airport) because my name contains an "ö", and the canonical spelling in the passport for this is "oe". This was cause for much confusion among the airport staff. I would have thought that people from CJK-countries were more understanding of encoding-to-latin weirdness than most, but apparently not.
  - z2 7y ago
    I think their understanding would be focused on the encoding for their language and a relatively narrow set of problems. I've encountered name issues in CJK countries that keep names in native encoding due to an assumption that full names fit within a couple of characters with no need for any spaces or punctuation. Some systems might be designed to be "accommodating" and take even up to 8 or 10 characters! There was one train system where my name had at least four different iterations through the tickets I collected, with different ordering of first and last names and truncating.
  - kijin 7y ago
    In defense of the Korean airport staff, they might have been more accommodating if the "ö" was completely and obviously broken, like "£‡�". Spelling it as "oe" makes it look like there are no encoding issues, in which case strict checking makes more sense. It's much easier to identify mojibake (they tend to be extremely obvious in CJK encodings) than to remember canonical spellings and other variations in a whole bunch of different languages. Airport staff probably know that "oe" and "œ" are interchangeable, but that's about it.
bonoboTP 7y ago
Diacritics are usually stripped in air travel. In Hungarian we have many letters with diacritics, but it is never a problem that the passport has them and the system doesn't.

adanto6840 7y ago

I too have an apostrophe in my name and experience the same thing. I've had people put it into their system as a comma, dash, space, and all sorts of weirdness despite my calling it out specifically. My experience has actually improved substantially in the last 10 years or so, and most of the government systems I encounter these days actually handle it properly (as well as handling suffix properly too). That said, I've somewhat recently started having trouble checking in for flights again -- I flew last month and it took the ticketing agent >20 minutes to find my reservation on both the outbound and return flights, even despite my providing the 'confirmation code' / itinerary email (we were checking bags & flying with infants, else I'd have done online check-in). It can be really frustrating -- though I'm hopeful it will continue improving and hopefully be a smoother experience by the time my kids are adults.

marcoperaza 7y ago
Out of curiosity, why not just omit the apostrophe for airline reservations then? I understand wanting your full, real name in many circumstances, but who cares about what the boarding pass says as long as you get to fly? I doubt the people checking ID would care about the missing apostrophe.
- jobigoud 7y ago
  But ID checking is also done electronically at some checkpoints. If your ticket doesn't match your passport, your Visa, your Visa waiver, etc. you are going to be in trouble. That being said last time I went to the US the person booking the ticket swapped my first name and last name. Only the person at the baggage dropoff noticed it, and after much deliberation they suggested to leave it that way. I went through with no issues apart from not being able to register the mileage.
- couchand 7y ago
  Practically speaking, that makes sense. Philosophically, it's abhorrent. Blaming the user is bad behavior in general. Expecting a person to alter their name to confirm to a poor software implementation is just wrong.

megous 7y ago

"I was not trying to do SQL injection, sir! My name is John Letme'or True"

pedrovhb 7y ago

For those unfamiliar with Bobby: https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/

jccalhoun 7y ago

I have a hyphen in my first name that also causes problems. I love it when I put my name in and the web site say "invalid first name." Thanks mom and dad... What is worse is people who "fix" my name by moving the second half of my first name and making it part of my last name. I'm an adult. I know what my name is.

speleding 7y ago
I have a double first name, so I have a space in my first name. Many people / systems seem to think I accidentally put my middle name in the first name field and helpfully move or drop the second part. Putting a hyphen in (which is not really supposed to be there) typically fixes it, so I'm variously known with a hyphenated and non-hyphenated name. But it rarely causes issues.
Avamander 7y ago
I write very strongly-worded letters to those companies. Honestly, I wish someone publicly shamed all those stupid companies.
an_openbook 7y ago
In Quebec, composite first names (prénoms composés) like Marc-Antoine are pretty common, so there was nothing weird about my parents giving me such a name. And frankly, most webforms I had to fill out while living there accepted my name just fine. However, now that I've moved to the United States, it's been a bit of an annoyance.

LeonM 7y ago

My name is officially spelled as Léon. The letter e with an acute accent causes all sorts of UTF-8 encoding issues with many services, not just airliners. If you interpret the UTF-8 é (0xC3A9) as ASCII it becomes Ã (0xC3) + © (0xA9), so my name often comes out as 'LÃ©on'. Airlines make it worse, because they strip both characters during sanity checking, so my name comes out as 'Lon', which has caused me problems a couple of times as the name on my passport did not match the name on the ticket.

deathanatos 7y ago
> If you interpret the UTF-8 é (0xC3A9) as ASCII it becomes Ã (0xC3) + © (0xA9) As latin1 (ISO-8859-1) or Win-1252; ASCII doesn't have either Ã or ©. latin1 is the default for text, including HTML, if you don't specify in protocols such as HTTP (modulo some stupidity from the WHATWG where it might be Win-1252 instead) and Windows-1252 is the default encoding in Windows in the USA (at least, prior to the Unicode APIs being added. The old APIs probably still exist though…). So these codecs pop up a lot in places where people who don't know what they're doing end up touching text.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I ran across some code once for descrambling data that had been incorrectly processed like that, which I found common in legal documents. It's an interesting problem, because strictly speaking, it's lossy, but you can use probabilities to figure out something plausible. You can decode/encode one thing as another, or you can decode/encode multiple times...
  - OkGoDoIt 7y ago
    Any chance you have a link? I’ve had implement solutions to this myself and it’s very tedious. If someone has built a more complete solution I would love to just use that instead
    - bulatb 7y ago
      This HN thread has some links and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103356

progval 7y ago

> the internet is going to wipe out apostrophes from people’s actual names Also seeing that with accentuated uppercase letters in French, even in nouns, because it's hard to type them on Windows. People still use accents in lowercase of course, but think that it's incorrect to use accents for uppercase letters, even when handwriting.

pfortuny 7y ago
It is obligatory in Spanish -using accents both in lower and upper cases...
kurtisc 7y ago
I only learned they do have the accents from your post. I was taught to omit them about a decade ago (as a second language).

xyst 7y ago

D'Von?

rco8786 7y ago
Nah, pretty common Irish last name

undersuit 7y ago

I did some research a few weeks back about why I have an apostrophe in my name. When the British conquered the Irish they started keeping records of the citizenry. The Ó used in Irish names to track descent was eschewed for O' in British record keeping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_name