16 ms·

Charset="WTF-8"

282 points by edent 2y ago

account42 2y ago
1) The "real" WTF-8 charset [0] is a cool and useful encoding. 2) This may be an unpopular opinion but I think restricting name input to latin is an OK thing to do, especially if the entered names are being viewed/used by humans who cannot be expected to be know all scripts. 3) Similarly, internationalized domain names were a mistake. If your business card tells me to go to stępień.com then chances are I won't bother to try end remember how to enter those accents on my keyboard layout. Most users won't even be able to enter them. Worse are letters that are visually indistinguishible - and no, registries preventing confusable names is not enough when I still won't know which letter to enter. This makes IDN domains less useful while retaining all the security issues they bring. Most languages were already forced to deal with ASCII and have developed standardized ways to "romanize" names and other words to that character set. This solution achieves peak interopability - not only between computer systems but also between the fleshy components operating them. [0] https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/ https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/
jtvjan 2y ago
A coworker once implemented a name validation regex that would reject his own name. It still mystifies me how much convincing it took to get him to make it less strict.
- croes 2y ago
  Is name validation even possible?
  - barryrandall 2y ago
    Anything is possible with enough qualifiers and caveats.
  - poizan42 2y ago
    Yes, it's easy bool ValidateName(string name) => true; (With the caveat that a name might not be representable in Unicode, in which case I dunno. Use an image format?)
    - arsome 2y ago
      name.Length > 0 is probably pretty safe.
      - tomxor 2y ago
        What if my name is
        chuckadams 2y ago
        Slim Shady?
      - pridkett 2y ago
        That only works if you’re concatenating the first and last name fields. Some people have no last name and thus would fail this validation if the system had fields for first and last name.
        cluckindan 2y ago
        some people have no name at all
        exitb 2y ago
        Any notable examples apart from young children and Michael Scott that one time?
        ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
        I've been compiling a list of them:
  - armada651 2y ago
    Yes, it is essential when you want to avoid doing business with customers who have invalid names.
    - Diti 2y ago
      What are “invalid names” in this context? Because, depending on the country the person was born in, a name can be literally anything, so I’m not sure what an invalid name looks like (unless you allow an `eval` of sorts).
      - dgoldstein0 2y ago
        Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
      - Muromec 2y ago
        The non-joke answer for Europe is extened Latin, dashes, spaces and apostrophe sign, separated into two (or three) distinct ordered fields. Just because it's written in a different script originally, doesn't mean it will printed only with that on your id in the country of residence or travel document issued at home. My name isn't written in Latin characters and it's fine. I know you can't even try to pronounce them, so I have it spelled out in above mentioned Latin script.
        throw_a_grenade 2y ago
        Non-joke answer for Europe is at least Latin, Greek or Cyrillic (български is already one of the official EU languages!). No reason to treat them differently, just don't allow for mixing them so you won't get homoglyphs. EURid (.eu-NIC) gets it mostly right I believe.
        account42 2y ago
        The non-theoretical answer for Europe is just Latin because the names need to eventually be read by people who don't know Greek or Cyrillic.
  - majkinetor 2y ago
    Sure it is. Context matters. For example, in clone wars.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    No, but it doesn’t stop people trying.
  - gmuslera 2y ago
    You may not want Bobby Tables in your system.
    - malfist 2y ago
      If you're prohibiting valid letters to protect your database because you didn't parametrize your queries, you're solving the problem from the wrong end
      - gmuslera 2y ago
        There might be more than just 2 ends. And some of them may not be fixable by you.
      - account42 2y ago
        This is all well and good until the company looses real money becaus some other system you are interfacing with got compromised because of your attitude and fingers start being pointed. Defense in depth is a thing.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    If you just use the {Alphabetic} Unicode character class (100K code points), together with a space, hyphen, and maybe comma, that might get you close. It includes diacritics. I'm curious if anyone can think of any other non-alphabetic characters used in legal names around the world, in other scripts? I wondered about numbers, but the most famous example of that has been overturned: "Originally named X Æ A-12, the child (whom they call X) had to have his name officially changed to X Æ A-Xii in order to align with California laws regarding birth certificates." (Of course I'm not saying you should do this. It is fun to wonder though.)
    - nicoburns 2y ago
      Apostrophe is common in surnames in parts of the world.
    - poizan42 2y ago
      You forgot apostrophe as is common in Irish names like O’Brien.
      - bloak 2y ago
        Yes, though O’Brien is Ó Briain in Irish, according to Wikipedia. I think the apostrophe in Irish names was added by English speakers, perhaps by analogy with "o'clock", perhaps to avoid writing something that would look like an initial. There are also English names of Norman origin that contain an apostrophe, though the only example I can think of immediately is the fictional d'Urberville.
    - gus_massa 2y ago
      Comma or apostrophe, like in d'Alembert ? (And I have 3 in my keyboard, I'm not sure everyone is using the same one.)
      - ahazred8ta 2y ago
        Mrs. Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele only had a string length problem, but there are people with a Hawaiian ʻokina in their names. U+02BB
  - zarzavat 2y ago
    Presumably there aren't any people with control characters in their name, for example.
    - eyelidlessness 2y ago
      That sounds like a reasonable assumption, but probably not strictly correct.
    - kijin 2y ago
      Challenge accepted, I'll try to put a backspace and a null byte in my firstborn's name. Hope I don't get swatted for crashing the government servers.
    - cobbzilla 2y ago
      Watch as someone names themselves the bell character, “^G” (ASCII code 7) [1] When they meet people, they tell them their name is unpronounceable, it’s the sound of a PC speaker from the late 20th century, but you can call them by their preferred nickname “beep”. In paper and online forms they are probably forced to go by the name “BEL”. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_character
      - emmelaich 2y ago
        Or Derek <wood dropping on desk> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ
        pavel_lishin 2y ago
        I thought this was going to be a link to the Key & Peele sketch: https://youtu.be/gODZzSOelss?t=180 https://youtu.be/gODZzSOelss?t=180
        Polizeiposaune 2y ago
        The interaction brings to mind Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U (from the Polish comedy film "How I Unleashed World War II")
  - nkrisc 2y ago
    It is if you first provide a complete specification of a “name”. Then you can validate if a name is compliant with your specification.
    - GrantMoyer 2y ago
      Valid names are those which terminate when run as Python programs.
    - Muromec 2y ago
      It's super easy actually. Name consists of three parts -- Family Name, Given Name and Patronymic, spelled using Ukrainian Cyrillic. You can have a dash in the Family name and apostrophe is part of Cyrillic for this purposes, but no spaces in any of the three. If are unfortunate enough to not use Cyrillic (of our variety) or Patronymics in the country of your origin (why didn't you stay there, anyway), we will fix it for you, mister Нкріск. If you belong to certain ethnic groups who by their custom insist on not using Patronymics, you can have a free pass, but life will be difficult, as not everybody got the memo really. No, you can not use Matronimyc instead of Patronymic, but give us another 30 years of not having a nuclear war with country name starting with "R" and ending in "full of putin slaves si iiia" and we might see to that. Unless of course the name is not used for official purposes, in which case you can get away with First-Last combination. It's really a non issue and the answer is jurisdiction bound. In most of Europe extented Latin set is used in place of Cyrillic (because they don't know better), so my name is transliterated for the purposes of being in the uncivilized realms by my own government. No, I can't just use Л and Я as part of my name anywhere here.
  - ValentinA23 2y ago
    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'
    - notanote 2y ago
      The name of the city has the L with stroke (pronounced as a W), so it’s Łódź.
      - poincaredisk 2y ago
        And the transliteration in this case is so far from the original that it's barely recognisable for me (three out of four characters are different and as a native I perceive Ł as a fully separate character, not as a funny variation of L)
        Muromec 2y ago
        The fact that it's pronounced as Вуч and not Лодж still triggers me.
        pavel_lishin 2y ago
        I just looked up the Russian wikipedia entry for it, and it's spelled "Лодзь", but it sounds like it's pronounced "Вуджь", and this fact irritates the hell out of me. Why would it be transliterated with an Л? And an О? And a з? None of this makes sense.
        Muromec 2y ago
        It's a general pattern of what russia does to names of places and people, which is aggressively imposing their own cultural paradigm (which follows the more general general pattern). You can look up your civil code provisions around names and ask a question or two of what historical problem they attempt to solve.
  - perching_aix 2y ago
    In certain cultures yes. Where I live, you can only select from a central, though frequently updated, list of names when naming your child. So theoretically only (given) names that are on that list can occur. Family names are not part of this, but maybe that exists too elsewhere. I don't know how people whose name has been given to them before this list was established is handled however. An alternative method, which is again culture dependent, is to use virtual governmental IDs for this purpose. Whether this is viable in practice I don't know, never implemented such a thing. But just on the surface, should be.
    - bjackman 2y ago
      I still don't see how any system in the real world can safely assume its users only have names from that list. Even if you try to imagine a system for a hospital to register newly born babies... What happens if a pregnant tourist is visiting?
      - perching_aix 2y ago
        With plenty of attitude of course :) I've only ever interacted with freeform textfields when inputting my name, so most regular systems clearly don't dare to attempt this. But if somebody was dead set on only serving local customers or having only local personnel, I can definitely imagine someone being brave(?) enough.
      - Y_Y 2y ago
        For example in Iceland you don't have to name the baby immediately, and the registration times are different for foreign parents.https://www.skra.is/english/people/registration-of-children/children-born-in-iceland/ https://www.skra.is/english/people/registration-of-children/... Of course then you may fall foul of classic falsehood 40: People have names.
        rrr_oh_man 2y ago
        For today's lucky 10,000: Falsehoods programmers believe about names (https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...)
  - michaelt 2y ago
    There are of course some people who'll point you to a blog post saying no validation is possible. However, for every 1 user you get whose full legal name is bob@example.com you'll get 100 users who put their e-mail into the name field by accident And for every 1 user who wants to be called e.e. cummings you'll get 100 who just didn't reach for the shift key and who actually prefer E.E. Cummings. But you'll also get 100 McCarthys and O'Connors and al-Rahmans who don't need their "wrong" capitalisation "fixed" thank you very much. Certainly, I think you can quite reasonably say a name should be comprised of between 2 and 75 characters, with no newlines, nulls, emojis, leading or trailing spaces, invalid unicode code points, or angle brackets.
- throw310822 2y ago
  I know multiple developers who would just say "well it's their fault, they have to change name then".
  - MrJohz 2y ago
    I worked with an office of Germans who insisted that ASCII was sufficient. The German language uses letters that cannot be represented in ASCII. In fairness, they mostly wanted stuff to be in English, and when necessary, to transliterate German characters into their English counterparts (in German there is a standardised way of doing this), so I can understand why they didn't see it was necessary. I just never understood why I, as the non-German, was forever the one trying to convince them that Germans would probably prefer to use their software in German...
    - account42 2y ago
      Perhaps you shouldn't be speaking for Germans then? Personally, I'd rather not have localization forces on me. Looking at you, Google.
      - MrJohz 2y ago
        I don't think localisation should be forced on anyone, but we had enough people using our software who couldn't speak English that getting it right would have made a lot of people's lives easier. At one place I worked, they even added Cantonese text to a help page to let Cantonese users know how to get support - but all the text on the buttons and links to get to that point was in English! As developers, we need to build software for our users, and not for ourselves. That means proper localisation, and it means giving users the option of choosing their own language and settings.
    - sandreas 2y ago
      You should have asked how they would encode the german currency sign (€ for euro) in ASCII or its german counterpart latin1/iso-8859-1... It's not possible. However I bet they would argument to use iso-8859-15 (latin9 / latin0) with the international currency sign (¤) instead or insist that char 128 of latin1 is almost always meant as €, so just ignore the standard in these cases and use a new font. This would only fail in older printers and who is still printing stuff these days? Nobody right? Using real utf-8 is just too complex... All these emojis are nuts
poizan42 2y ago
I have an 'æ' in my middle name (formally secondary first name because history reasons). Usually I just don't use it, but it's always funny when a payment form instructs me to write my full name exactly as written on my credit card, and then goes on to tell me my name is invalid.
- pzduniak 2y ago
  I live in Łódź. Love receiving packages addressed to ??d? :)
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    It goes both ways. I received a large delivery from Poland recently, and it was addressed to "K?benhavn", with similar mistakes in the street name.
  - troymc 2y ago
    I wonder how many of those packages end up in Vada, Italy. Or Cody, Wyoming. Or Buda, Texas...
    - jplrssn 2y ago
      I imagine the “Poland” part of the address would narrow it down somewhat.
      - mkotowski 2y ago
        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 lot to search for a lost package. [0]: https://dane.gov.pl/pl/dataset/188,wykaz-urzedowych-nazw-miejscowosci-i-ich-czesci https://dane.gov.pl/pl/dataset/188,wykaz-urzedowych-nazw-mie...
card_zero 2y ago
Pfft, "Dein Name ist ungültig" (your name is invalid). Let's get straight to the point, it's the user's fault for having a bad name, user needs to fix this.
cabirum 2y ago
How do I allow "stępień" while detecting Zalgo-isms?
- egypturnash 2y ago
  Zalgo is largely the result of abusing combining modifiers. Declare that any string with more than n combining modifiers in a row is invalid. n=1 is probably a reasonable falsehood to believe about names until someone points out that language X regularly has multiple combining modifiers in a row, at which point you can bump up N to somewhere around the maximum number of combining modifiers language X is likely to have, add a special case to say "this is probably language X so we don't look for Zalgos", or just give up and put some Zalgo in your test corpus, start looking for places where it breaks things, and fix whatever breaks in a way that isn't funny.
  - zvr 2y ago
    I can point out that Greek needs n=2: for accent and breathing.
  - ahazred8ta 2y ago
    N=2 is common in Việt Nam. (vowel sound + tonal pitch)
    - anttihaapala 2y ago
      Yet Vietnamese can be written in Unicode without any combining characters whatsoever - in NFC normalization each character is one code point - just like the U+1EC7 LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND DOT BELOW in your example.
      - cryptonector 2y ago
        u/egypurnash's point was about limiting glyph complexity. You could canonically decompose then look for more than N (say, N=3) combining codepoints in a row and reject if any are found. Canonical forms have nothing to do with actual glyph complexity, but conceptually[0] normalizing first might be a good first step. [0] I say conceptually because you might implement a form-insensitive Zalgo detector that looks at each non-combining codepoint, looks it up in the Unicode database to find how many combining codepoints one would need if canonically decomposing and call that `n`, then count from there all the following combining codepoints, and if that exceeds `N` then reject. This approach is fairly optimal because most of the time most characters in most strings don't decompose to more than one codepoint, and even if they do you save the cost of allocating a buffer to normalize into and the associated memory stores.
Diggsey 2y ago
I thought this was https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/ https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/
- webstrand 2y ago
  Yeah, this is just issues caused by ascii
RadiozRadioz 2y ago
I've got a good feel now for which forms will accept my name and which won't, though mostly I default to an ASCII version for safety. Similarly, I've found a way to mangle my address to fit a US house/state/city/zip format. I don't feel unwelcome, I emphathize with the developers. I'd certainly hate to figure out address entry for all countries. At least the US format is consistent across websites and I can have a high degree of confidence that it'll work in the software, and my local postal service know what to do because they see it all the time.
- Arch485 2y ago
  You can grab JSON data of all ISO recognized countries and their address formats on GitHub (apologies, I forget the repo name. IIRC there is more than one). I don't know if it's 100% accurate, but it's not very hard to implement it as part of an address entry form. I think the main issue is that most developers don't know it exists,
- saurik 2y ago
  At the end of the day, a postal address is printed to an envelope or package as a single block of text and then read back and parsed somehow by the people delivering the package (usually by a machine most of the way, but even these days more by humans as the package gets closer to the destination). This means that, in a very real sense, the "correct" way to enter an address is into a single giant multi-line text box with the implication that the user must provide whatever is required to be printed onto the mailing label such that a carrier will successfully be able to find them. Really, then, the reasons why we bother trying to break out an address into multiple parts is not directly caused by the need for an address at all: it is because we 1) might not trust the user to provide for us everything required to make the address valid (assuming the country or even state, or giving us only a street address with no city or postal code... both mistakes that are likely extremely common without a multi-field form), or 2) need to know some subset of the address ourselves and do not trust ourselves to parse back the fuzzy address the same way as the postal service might, either for taxes or to help establish shipping rates. FWIW, I'd venture to say that #2 is sufficiently common -- as if you need a street address for shipping you are going to need to be careful about sales taxes and VAT, increasingly often even if you aren't located in the state or even country to which the shipment will be made -- that it almost becomes nonsensical to support accepting an address for a location where you aren't already sure of the format convention ahead of time (as that just leads you to only later realizing you failed to collect a tax, will be charged a fortune to ship there, or even that it simply isn't possible to deliver anything to that country)... and like, if you don't intend to ship anything, you actually do not need the full address anyway (credit cards, as an obvious example, don't need or use the full address).
KPGv2 2y ago
It seems ridiculous to apply form validation to a name, given the complexity of charsets involved. I don't even validate email addresses. I remember [this](https://www.netmeister.org/blog/email.html https://www.netmeister.org/blog/email.html) wonderful explainer of why your email validation regex is wrong.
- nedt 2y ago
  In HTML if you use <input type="email"> you basically get a regex validation. While it not fully follows the RFC it's a good middle ground. And it gives you an email that you can use on the internet (RFC obviously has some cases that are outside of this scope). That's why I tend to prefer what's defined in the standard: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/input.html#email-state-(type=email) https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/input.html#email-stat...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
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imrejonk 2y ago
A 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.
- account42 2y ago
  It's only insulting if you want to be insulted. You'd do better learning to understand that its a computer system and not a personal attack.
  - imrejonk 2y ago
    While I agree with you that an error message like this should not be taken as a personal attack, it still causes a horrible user experience. It’s not like the developers of these systems had no choice in the wording of these errors: they picked the insensitive computer-says-no option, while they could have went with an apologetic “Sorry, our system does not support special characters” instead.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- notanote 2y ago
  That’s the best one of the lot. "Dein Name ist ungültig", "Your name is invalid", written with the informal word for "your".
  - rossdavidh 2y ago
    They're trying to say that you and the server are very close friends, you see? No, no, I get this is not correct, just a joke...
    - account42 2y ago
      Formal pronouns in German are on their way out anyway, including in but not limited to software interfaces.
ginko 2y ago
Under 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_Brussels_-_2019/AR/1006 https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=Court_of_Appeal_of_Brusse...
- xigoi 2y ago
  This seems to only apply to banks.
  - pornel 2y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if that created kafkaesque problems with other institutions that require name to match the bank account exactly, and break/reject non-ASCII at the same time.
    - robin_reala 2y ago
      I know an Åsa who became variously Åsa, Aasa and Asa after moving to a non-Scandinavian country. That took a while to untangle, and caused some of the problems you describe.
      - samatman 2y ago
        Spelled with an Angstrom, or with a Latin Capital Letter A With Ring Above?
        robin_reala 2y ago
        The second. It’s the 27th letter of the Swedish alphabet.
  - postepowanieadm 2y ago
    No, anywhere where your name is used.
  - robin_reala 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
stop_nazi 2y ago
grzegorz brzęczyszczykiewicz
- dvh 2y ago
  Looks ok in my language: Gřegoř Bženčiščikievič
  - postepowanieadm 2y ago
    You miss "ę"!
    - dvh 2y ago
      I don't think I did. I watched the video and this is the phonetic transcription. I hear b zh e n ch ...
      - int_19h 2y ago
        "ę" is not [e] followed by [n], it's a single nasalized vowel. Kinda like "ň" in Czech is not just [n] followed by [j], although it kinda sounds like that to people whose native language does not have a palatalized N sound.
- nicbou 2y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U For the curious
Hackbraten 2y ago
Situations like these regularly make me feel ashamed about being a software developer.
jccalhoun 2y ago
My first name is hyphenated. I still find forms that reject it. My favorite was one that say "invalid first name."
Pesthuf 2y ago
I totally get that companies are probably more successful using simple validation rules, that work for the vast majority of names rather than just accepting everything just so that some person with no name or someone whose name cannot possibly be expressed or at least transliterated to Unicode can use their services. But that person's name has no business failing validation. They fucked up.
surfingdino 2y ago
I 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.
- ACS_Solver 2y ago
  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.
xyst 2y ago
Software has been gaslighting generations of people around the world. Side note: not a bad way to skirt surveillance though. A name like “stępień” will without a doubt have many ambiguous spellings across different intelligence gathering systems (RUMINT, OSINT, …). Americans will probably spell it as “Stefen” or “Steven” or “Stephen”, especially once communicated over phone.
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  Turns out just foreign document is enough for that sometimes ;) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7899171.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7899171.stm
ljouhet 2y ago
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.")
- Etheryte 2y ago
  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.
  - account42 2y ago
    It's not a fallback, it's the actual domain name.
powersnail 2y ago
As 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.
- Muromec 2y ago
  Okay, I have a non-ASCII (non Latin even) name, so I can tell. You just ask explicitly how my name is spelled in a bank system or my government id. Please don't try transliteration, unless you know exact rules the other system suggests to transliterate my name from the one cultural context into another and then still make it a suggestion and make it clear for which purpose it will be used (and then only use it for that purpose). And please please please, don't try to be smart and detect the cultural context from the character set before automatically translating it to another character set. It will go wrong and you will not notice for a long time, but people will make mean passive aggressive screenshots of your product too. My bank for example knows my legal name in Cyrillic, but will not print it on a card, so they make best-effort attempt to transliterate it to ASCII, but make it editable field and will ask me to confirm this is how I want it to be on a card.
- matthewbauer 2y ago
  You can just show the user the transliteration & have them confirm it makes sense. Always store the original version since you can't reverse the process. But you can compare the transliterated version to make sure it matches. Debit cards a pretty common example of this. I believe you can only have ASCII in the cardholder name field.
  - Muromec 2y ago
wruza 2y ago
I'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.
- Muromec 2y ago
  >so he just selects a subset he can handle and bans everything else. Yes? And the problem is?
  - throwaway290 2y ago
    The next guy with a different subset? :)
    - Muromec 2y ago
      The subset is mostly defined by the jurisdiction you operate in, which usually defines a process to map names from one subset to another and is also in the business of keeping the log of said operation. The problem is not operating in a subset, but defining it wrong and not being aware there are multiple of those. If different parts of your system operate in different jurisdictions (or interface which other systems that do), you have to pick multiple subsets and ask user to provide input for each of them. You just can't put anything other than ASCII into either payment card or PNR and the rules of minimal length will differ for the two and you can't put ASCII into the government database which explicitly rejects all of ASCII letters.
      - throwaway290 2y ago
        HN does not accept emoji because of jurisdiction huh?
josephcsible 2y ago
What would be wrong with "enter your name as it appears in the machine-readable zone of your passport" (or "would appear" for people who have never gotten one)? Isn't that the one standard format for names that actually is universal?
- ahoka 2y ago
  I would like to use my name as my parents gave it to me, thanks. Is that too much to ask for?
  - account42 2y ago
    If your parents were smartasses, then yes.
  - richardwhiuk 2y ago
    How much flexibility are we giving parents in what they name children? If a parent invented a totally new glyph, would supporting that be a requirement?
    - Muromec 2y ago
      Luckily, there is a vital records keeping office which already bothered to check with the law on that matter and if they can write it, so can you.
- ks2048 2y ago
  There's the problem that "appears" is a visible phenomenon and unicode strings can contain non-visible characters and multiple ways to represent the same visible information. Normalization is supposed to help here, but some sites may fail to do this or do incorrectly, etc.
  - josephcsible 2y ago
    But the MRZ of a passport doesn't contain any of those problem characters.
gavinsyancey 2y ago
WTF-8 is actually a real encoding, used for encoding invalid UTF-16 unpaired surrogates for UTF-8 systems: https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/ https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/
- bjackman 2y ago
  I believe this is what Rust OsStrings are under the hood on Windows.
  - extraduder_ire 2y ago
    Which I assume stands for "Windows-Transformation-Format-8(bits)".
    - mmoskal 2y ago
      Abstract WTF-8 (Wobbly Transformation Format − 8-bit) is a superset of UTF-8 that encodes surrogate code points if they are not in a pair.
      - hedora 2y ago
        Can you still assume the bytes 0x00 and 0xFF are not present in the string (like in UTF-8?)
        int_19h 2y ago
        Yes. The only difference between UTF-8 and WTF-8 is that the latter does not reject otherwise valid UTF-8 byte sequences that correspond to codepoints in range U+D800 to U+DFFF (which means that, in practice, a lot of things that say they are UTF-8 are actually WTF-8).
        account42 2y ago
        Not really since you are unlikely to end up with unpaired surrogates outside of UTF-16 unless you explicitly implement a WTF-16 decoder - most other things are going to error out or remove/replace the garbage data when converting to another encoding. And if you convert valid UTF-16 by interpreting them as UCS-2 and then not check for invalid code points you are going to end up with either valid UTF-8 or something that isn't even valid WTF-8 since that encoding disallows paired surrogates to be encoded individually. WTF-16 is something that occurs naturally. WTF-8 isn't.
rurban 2y ago
Just use the unicode identifier rules, my libu8ident. https://github.com/rurban/libu8ident https://github.com/rurban/libu8ident Windows folks need to convert to UTF—8 first
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  That's nice. Which restriction level handles all names?
  - rurban 2y ago
    Every. Identifiers are identifiable names. Most languages with unicode name support only support symbols, ie not identifiable names (binary trash).
bawolff 2y ago
Its really not that hard though. PCRE regex support unicode letter classes. There is really no excuse for this type of issue.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  `..*` should be a good validation regexp. At that point you might as well check only that length is non-zero and the the name is valid Unicode and nothing more. Well, ok, maybe look at UTR-#36 and maybe disallow / filter out non-printing characters, PUCs, and what not.
kgeist 2y ago
My rule of thumb is to treat strings as opaque blobs most of the time. The only validation I'd always enforce is some sane length limit, to prevent users from shoving entire novels inside. If you treat your strings as opaque blobs, and use UTF8, most of internationalization problems go away. Imho often times, input validation is an attempt to solve a problem from the wrong side. Say, when XSS or SQL injections are found on a site, I've seen people's first reaction to be validation of user input by looking for "special symbols", or add a whitelist of allowed characters, instead of simply escaping strings right before rendering HTML (and modern frameworks do it automatically), or using parameterized queries if it's SQL. If a user wants to call themselves "alert('hello')", why not? Why the arbitrary limits? I think there're very few exceptions to this, probably something law-related, or if you have to interact with some legacy service.
- kazinator 2y ago
  > treat strings as opaque blobs most of the time While being transparent is great and better than stupidly mangling or rejecting data, the problem is that if we just pass through anything, there are situations and contexts in which some kinds of software could be used as part of a chain of deception involving Unicode/font tricks. Passing through is mostly good. Even in software that has to care about this, not every layer through which text passes should have the responsibility.
- ddulaney 2y ago
  There's at least one major exception to this: Unicode normalization. It's possible for the same logical character to have two different sets of code points (for example, a-with-umlaut as a single character, vs a followed by umlaut combining diacritic). Related, distinguishing between the "a" character in Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and the handful of other times it shows up throughout Unicode. This comes up in at least 3 ways: 1. A usability issue. It's not always easy to predict which identical-looking variant is produced by different input methods, so users enter the identical-looking characters on different devices but get an account not found error. 2. A security issue. If some of your backend systems handle these kinds of characters differently, that can cause all kinds of weird bugs, some of which can be exploited. 3. An abuse issue. If it's possible to create accounts with the same-looking name as others that aren't the same account, there can be vectors for impersonation, harassment, and other issues. So you have to make a policy choice about how to handle this problem. The only things that I've seen work are either restricting the allowed characters (often just to printable ASCII) or being very clear and strict about always performing one of the standard Unicode transformations. But doing that transformation consistently across a big codebase has some real challenges: in particular, it can change based on Unicode version, and guaranteeing that all potential services use the same Unicode version is really non-trivial. So lots of people make the (sensible) choice not to deal with it. But yeah, agreed that parenthesis should be OK.
hedora 2y ago
I’d expect iCloud to accept that name, even though Rachel True’s name breaks the heck out of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/lz27ou/she_has_true_as_her_last_name_and_that_breaks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/lz27ou/she...
dathinab 2y ago
fun fact there is a semi standard encoding called wtf-8 which is utf-8 extended in a way so that it can represent non well formed utf-16 (bad surrogate code points) it's used in situations like when a utf-8 based system has to interact with Windows file paths
rawbert 2y ago
OMG, the second screenshot might be actually the application i am working on right now ...
mdavid626 2y ago
It's like with phone numbers. Some people assume they contain only digits.
dcow 2y ago
Apropos: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
rmrfchik 2y ago
Well, the labels of input fields are written in English yet user enters his name in native language. What's the reason of having name at all? You can call the person by this name. But if I write you my name in my language, what you (not knowing how to read it) can do? Only "hey, still-don't-know-you, here is your info". In my foreign passport I have name __transliterated__ to Latin alphabet. Shouldn't this be the case for other places?
- int_19h 2y ago
  Unfortunately, the extremely weird and idiosyncratic use of Latin script for English means that straightforward transliterations are usually pronounced incorrectly by people who try to pronounce them according to English rules. And, on the other end of the spectrum, you have attempts to spell phonetically following English orthography, which then causes issues because it's tied to a particular dialect of English. E.g. the traditional Korean romanization of the name "Park" has "r" there solely so that "a" would actually correspond to an [a] sound in British English - but then, of course, American English is rhotic, and so it ends up being incorrectly pronounced as [park].
  - account42 2y ago
    "Usually" it's pretty close to the correct pronounciation. Pretty much always it's good enough to be understandable.
- smatija 2y ago
  w3c recommends adding a separate field for pronounciation - see e.g. paragraph after second image in https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names#splitting https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names...
  - rmrfchik 2y ago
    Wow, that's neat.
wvh 2y ago
There's little more you can do to validate a name internationally than to provide one textbox and check if it's a valid encoding of Unicode. Maybe you can exclude some control and graphical ranges at best. Of course there are valid concerns that international names should pass through e.g. local postal services, which would require at least some kind of Latinized representation of name and address. I suppose the Latin alphabet is the most convenient minimal common denominator across writing systems, even though I admit being Euro-centric.
egorfine 2y ago
Mandatory mention: https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

282 points by edent 2y ago

1) The "real" WTF-8 charset [0] is a cool and useful encoding. 2) This may be an unpopular opinion but I think restricting name input to latin is an OK thing to do, especially if the entered names are being viewed/used by humans who cannot be expected to be know all scripts. 3) Similarly, internationalized domain names were a mistake. If your business card tells me to go to stępień.com then chances are I won't bother to try end remember how to enter those accents on my keyboard layout. Most users won't even be able to enter them. Worse are letters that are visually indistinguishible - and no, registries preventing confusable names is not enough when I still won't know which letter to enter. This makes IDN domains less useful while retaining all the security issues they bring. Most languages were already forced to deal with ASCII and have developed standardized ways to "romanize" names and other words to that character set. This solution achieves peak interopability - not only between computer systems but also between the fleshy components operating them. [0] https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/ https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/

jtvjan 2y ago

A coworker once implemented a name validation regex that would reject his own name. It still mystifies me how much convincing it took to get him to make it less strict.

croes 2y ago
Is name validation even possible?
- barryrandall 2y ago
  Anything is possible with enough qualifiers and caveats.
- poizan42 2y ago
  Yes, it's easy bool ValidateName(string name) => true; (With the caveat that a name might not be representable in Unicode, in which case I dunno. Use an image format?)
  - arsome 2y ago
    name.Length > 0 is probably pretty safe.
    - tomxor 2y ago
      What if my name is
      - chuckadams 2y ago
        Slim Shady?
    - pridkett 2y ago
      That only works if you’re concatenating the first and last name fields. Some people have no last name and thus would fail this validation if the system had fields for first and last name.
      - cluckindan 2y ago
        some people have no name at all
        exitb 2y ago
        Any notable examples apart from young children and Michael Scott that one time?
        ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
        I've been compiling a list of them:
- armada651 2y ago
  Yes, it is essential when you want to avoid doing business with customers who have invalid names.
  - Diti 2y ago
    What are “invalid names” in this context? Because, depending on the country the person was born in, a name can be literally anything, so I’m not sure what an invalid name looks like (unless you allow an `eval` of sorts).
    - dgoldstein0 2y ago
      Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
    - Muromec 2y ago
      The non-joke answer for Europe is extened Latin, dashes, spaces and apostrophe sign, separated into two (or three) distinct ordered fields. Just because it's written in a different script originally, doesn't mean it will printed only with that on your id in the country of residence or travel document issued at home. My name isn't written in Latin characters and it's fine. I know you can't even try to pronounce them, so I have it spelled out in above mentioned Latin script.
      - throw_a_grenade 2y ago
        Non-joke answer for Europe is at least Latin, Greek or Cyrillic (български is already one of the official EU languages!). No reason to treat them differently, just don't allow for mixing them so you won't get homoglyphs. EURid (.eu-NIC) gets it mostly right I believe.
        account42 2y ago
        The non-theoretical answer for Europe is just Latin because the names need to eventually be read by people who don't know Greek or Cyrillic.
- majkinetor 2y ago
  Sure it is. Context matters. For example, in clone wars.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  No, but it doesn’t stop people trying.
- gmuslera 2y ago
  You may not want Bobby Tables in your system.
  - malfist 2y ago
    If you're prohibiting valid letters to protect your database because you didn't parametrize your queries, you're solving the problem from the wrong end
    - gmuslera 2y ago
      There might be more than just 2 ends. And some of them may not be fixable by you.
    - account42 2y ago
      This is all well and good until the company looses real money becaus some other system you are interfacing with got compromised because of your attitude and fingers start being pointed. Defense in depth is a thing.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  If you just use the {Alphabetic} Unicode character class (100K code points), together with a space, hyphen, and maybe comma, that might get you close. It includes diacritics. I'm curious if anyone can think of any other non-alphabetic characters used in legal names around the world, in other scripts? I wondered about numbers, but the most famous example of that has been overturned: "Originally named X Æ A-12, the child (whom they call X) had to have his name officially changed to X Æ A-Xii in order to align with California laws regarding birth certificates." (Of course I'm not saying you should do this. It is fun to wonder though.)
  - nicoburns 2y ago
    Apostrophe is common in surnames in parts of the world.
  - poizan42 2y ago
    You forgot apostrophe as is common in Irish names like O’Brien.
    - bloak 2y ago
      Yes, though O’Brien is Ó Briain in Irish, according to Wikipedia. I think the apostrophe in Irish names was added by English speakers, perhaps by analogy with "o'clock", perhaps to avoid writing something that would look like an initial. There are also English names of Norman origin that contain an apostrophe, though the only example I can think of immediately is the fictional d'Urberville.
  - gus_massa 2y ago
    Comma or apostrophe, like in d'Alembert ? (And I have 3 in my keyboard, I'm not sure everyone is using the same one.)
    - ahazred8ta 2y ago
      Mrs. Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele only had a string length problem, but there are people with a Hawaiian ʻokina in their names. U+02BB
- zarzavat 2y ago
  Presumably there aren't any people with control characters in their name, for example.
  - eyelidlessness 2y ago
    That sounds like a reasonable assumption, but probably not strictly correct.
  - kijin 2y ago
    Challenge accepted, I'll try to put a backspace and a null byte in my firstborn's name. Hope I don't get swatted for crashing the government servers.
  - cobbzilla 2y ago
    Watch as someone names themselves the bell character, “^G” (ASCII code 7) [1] When they meet people, they tell them their name is unpronounceable, it’s the sound of a PC speaker from the late 20th century, but you can call them by their preferred nickname “beep”. In paper and online forms they are probably forced to go by the name “BEL”. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_character
    - emmelaich 2y ago
      Or Derek <wood dropping on desk> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ
      - pavel_lishin 2y ago
        I thought this was going to be a link to the Key & Peele sketch: https://youtu.be/gODZzSOelss?t=180 https://youtu.be/gODZzSOelss?t=180
      - Polizeiposaune 2y ago
        The interaction brings to mind Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U (from the Polish comedy film "How I Unleashed World War II")
- nkrisc 2y ago
  It is if you first provide a complete specification of a “name”. Then you can validate if a name is compliant with your specification.
  - GrantMoyer 2y ago
    Valid names are those which terminate when run as Python programs.
  - Muromec 2y ago
    It's super easy actually. Name consists of three parts -- Family Name, Given Name and Patronymic, spelled using Ukrainian Cyrillic. You can have a dash in the Family name and apostrophe is part of Cyrillic for this purposes, but no spaces in any of the three. If are unfortunate enough to not use Cyrillic (of our variety) or Patronymics in the country of your origin (why didn't you stay there, anyway), we will fix it for you, mister Нкріск. If you belong to certain ethnic groups who by their custom insist on not using Patronymics, you can have a free pass, but life will be difficult, as not everybody got the memo really. No, you can not use Matronimyc instead of Patronymic, but give us another 30 years of not having a nuclear war with country name starting with "R" and ending in "full of putin slaves si iiia" and we might see to that. Unless of course the name is not used for official purposes, in which case you can get away with First-Last combination. It's really a non issue and the answer is jurisdiction bound. In most of Europe extented Latin set is used in place of Cyrillic (because they don't know better), so my name is transliterated for the purposes of being in the uncivilized realms by my own government. No, I can't just use Л and Я as part of my name anywhere here.
- ValentinA23 2y ago
  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'
  - notanote 2y ago
    The name of the city has the L with stroke (pronounced as a W), so it’s Łódź.
    - poincaredisk 2y ago
      And the transliteration in this case is so far from the original that it's barely recognisable for me (three out of four characters are different and as a native I perceive Ł as a fully separate character, not as a funny variation of L)
      - Muromec 2y ago
        The fact that it's pronounced as Вуч and not Лодж still triggers me.
        pavel_lishin 2y ago
        I just looked up the Russian wikipedia entry for it, and it's spelled "Лодзь", but it sounds like it's pronounced "Вуджь", and this fact irritates the hell out of me. Why would it be transliterated with an Л? And an О? And a з? None of this makes sense.
        Muromec 2y ago
        It's a general pattern of what russia does to names of places and people, which is aggressively imposing their own cultural paradigm (which follows the more general general pattern). You can look up your civil code provisions around names and ask a question or two of what historical problem they attempt to solve.
- perching_aix 2y ago
  In certain cultures yes. Where I live, you can only select from a central, though frequently updated, list of names when naming your child. So theoretically only (given) names that are on that list can occur. Family names are not part of this, but maybe that exists too elsewhere. I don't know how people whose name has been given to them before this list was established is handled however. An alternative method, which is again culture dependent, is to use virtual governmental IDs for this purpose. Whether this is viable in practice I don't know, never implemented such a thing. But just on the surface, should be.
  - bjackman 2y ago
    I still don't see how any system in the real world can safely assume its users only have names from that list. Even if you try to imagine a system for a hospital to register newly born babies... What happens if a pregnant tourist is visiting?
    - perching_aix 2y ago
      With plenty of attitude of course :) I've only ever interacted with freeform textfields when inputting my name, so most regular systems clearly don't dare to attempt this. But if somebody was dead set on only serving local customers or having only local personnel, I can definitely imagine someone being brave(?) enough.
    - Y_Y 2y ago
      For example in Iceland you don't have to name the baby immediately, and the registration times are different for foreign parents.https://www.skra.is/english/people/registration-of-children/children-born-in-iceland/ https://www.skra.is/english/people/registration-of-children/... Of course then you may fall foul of classic falsehood 40: People have names.
      - rrr_oh_man 2y ago
        For today's lucky 10,000: Falsehoods programmers believe about names (https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...)
- michaelt 2y ago
  There are of course some people who'll point you to a blog post saying no validation is possible. However, for every 1 user you get whose full legal name is bob@example.com you'll get 100 users who put their e-mail into the name field by accident And for every 1 user who wants to be called e.e. cummings you'll get 100 who just didn't reach for the shift key and who actually prefer E.E. Cummings. But you'll also get 100 McCarthys and O'Connors and al-Rahmans who don't need their "wrong" capitalisation "fixed" thank you very much. Certainly, I think you can quite reasonably say a name should be comprised of between 2 and 75 characters, with no newlines, nulls, emojis, leading or trailing spaces, invalid unicode code points, or angle brackets.
throw310822 2y ago
I know multiple developers who would just say "well it's their fault, they have to change name then".
- MrJohz 2y ago
  I worked with an office of Germans who insisted that ASCII was sufficient. The German language uses letters that cannot be represented in ASCII. In fairness, they mostly wanted stuff to be in English, and when necessary, to transliterate German characters into their English counterparts (in German there is a standardised way of doing this), so I can understand why they didn't see it was necessary. I just never understood why I, as the non-German, was forever the one trying to convince them that Germans would probably prefer to use their software in German...
  - account42 2y ago
    Perhaps you shouldn't be speaking for Germans then? Personally, I'd rather not have localization forces on me. Looking at you, Google.
    - MrJohz 2y ago
      I don't think localisation should be forced on anyone, but we had enough people using our software who couldn't speak English that getting it right would have made a lot of people's lives easier. At one place I worked, they even added Cantonese text to a help page to let Cantonese users know how to get support - but all the text on the buttons and links to get to that point was in English! As developers, we need to build software for our users, and not for ourselves. That means proper localisation, and it means giving users the option of choosing their own language and settings.
  - sandreas 2y ago
    You should have asked how they would encode the german currency sign (€ for euro) in ASCII or its german counterpart latin1/iso-8859-1... It's not possible. However I bet they would argument to use iso-8859-15 (latin9 / latin0) with the international currency sign (¤) instead or insist that char 128 of latin1 is almost always meant as €, so just ignore the standard in these cases and use a new font. This would only fail in older printers and who is still printing stuff these days? Nobody right? Using real utf-8 is just too complex... All these emojis are nuts

poizan42 2y ago

I have an 'æ' in my middle name (formally secondary first name because history reasons). Usually I just don't use it, but it's always funny when a payment form instructs me to write my full name exactly as written on my credit card, and then goes on to tell me my name is invalid.

pzduniak 2y ago
I live in Łódź. Love receiving packages addressed to ??d? :)
- Symbiote 2y ago
  It goes both ways. I received a large delivery from Poland recently, and it was addressed to "K?benhavn", with similar mistakes in the street name.
- troymc 2y ago
  I wonder how many of those packages end up in Vada, Italy. Or Cody, Wyoming. Or Buda, Texas...
  - jplrssn 2y ago
    I imagine the “Poland” part of the address would narrow it down somewhat.
    - mkotowski 2y ago
      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 lot to search for a lost package. [0]: https://dane.gov.pl/pl/dataset/188,wykaz-urzedowych-nazw-miejscowosci-i-ich-czesci https://dane.gov.pl/pl/dataset/188,wykaz-urzedowych-nazw-mie...

card_zero 2y ago

Pfft, "Dein Name ist ungültig" (your name is invalid). Let's get straight to the point, it's the user's fault for having a bad name, user needs to fix this.

cabirum 2y ago

How do I allow "stępień" while detecting Zalgo-isms?

egypturnash 2y ago
Zalgo is largely the result of abusing combining modifiers. Declare that any string with more than n combining modifiers in a row is invalid. n=1 is probably a reasonable falsehood to believe about names until someone points out that language X regularly has multiple combining modifiers in a row, at which point you can bump up N to somewhere around the maximum number of combining modifiers language X is likely to have, add a special case to say "this is probably language X so we don't look for Zalgos", or just give up and put some Zalgo in your test corpus, start looking for places where it breaks things, and fix whatever breaks in a way that isn't funny.
- zvr 2y ago
  I can point out that Greek needs n=2: for accent and breathing.
- ahazred8ta 2y ago
  N=2 is common in Việt Nam. (vowel sound + tonal pitch)
  - anttihaapala 2y ago
    Yet Vietnamese can be written in Unicode without any combining characters whatsoever - in NFC normalization each character is one code point - just like the U+1EC7 LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND DOT BELOW in your example.
    - cryptonector 2y ago
      u/egypurnash's point was about limiting glyph complexity. You could canonically decompose then look for more than N (say, N=3) combining codepoints in a row and reject if any are found. Canonical forms have nothing to do with actual glyph complexity, but conceptually[0] normalizing first might be a good first step. [0] I say conceptually because you might implement a form-insensitive Zalgo detector that looks at each non-combining codepoint, looks it up in the Unicode database to find how many combining codepoints one would need if canonically decomposing and call that `n`, then count from there all the following combining codepoints, and if that exceeds `N` then reject. This approach is fairly optimal because most of the time most characters in most strings don't decompose to more than one codepoint, and even if they do you save the cost of allocating a buffer to normalize into and the associated memory stores.

Diggsey 2y ago

I thought this was https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/ https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/

webstrand 2y ago
Yeah, this is just issues caused by ascii

RadiozRadioz 2y ago

I've got a good feel now for which forms will accept my name and which won't, though mostly I default to an ASCII version for safety. Similarly, I've found a way to mangle my address to fit a US house/state/city/zip format. I don't feel unwelcome, I emphathize with the developers. I'd certainly hate to figure out address entry for all countries. At least the US format is consistent across websites and I can have a high degree of confidence that it'll work in the software, and my local postal service know what to do because they see it all the time.

Arch485 2y ago
You can grab JSON data of all ISO recognized countries and their address formats on GitHub (apologies, I forget the repo name. IIRC there is more than one). I don't know if it's 100% accurate, but it's not very hard to implement it as part of an address entry form. I think the main issue is that most developers don't know it exists,
saurik 2y ago
At the end of the day, a postal address is printed to an envelope or package as a single block of text and then read back and parsed somehow by the people delivering the package (usually by a machine most of the way, but even these days more by humans as the package gets closer to the destination). This means that, in a very real sense, the "correct" way to enter an address is into a single giant multi-line text box with the implication that the user must provide whatever is required to be printed onto the mailing label such that a carrier will successfully be able to find them. Really, then, the reasons why we bother trying to break out an address into multiple parts is not directly caused by the need for an address at all: it is because we 1) might not trust the user to provide for us everything required to make the address valid (assuming the country or even state, or giving us only a street address with no city or postal code... both mistakes that are likely extremely common without a multi-field form), or 2) need to know some subset of the address ourselves and do not trust ourselves to parse back the fuzzy address the same way as the postal service might, either for taxes or to help establish shipping rates. FWIW, I'd venture to say that #2 is sufficiently common -- as if you need a street address for shipping you are going to need to be careful about sales taxes and VAT, increasingly often even if you aren't located in the state or even country to which the shipment will be made -- that it almost becomes nonsensical to support accepting an address for a location where you aren't already sure of the format convention ahead of time (as that just leads you to only later realizing you failed to collect a tax, will be charged a fortune to ship there, or even that it simply isn't possible to deliver anything to that country)... and like, if you don't intend to ship anything, you actually do not need the full address anyway (credit cards, as an obvious example, don't need or use the full address).

KPGv2 2y ago

It seems ridiculous to apply form validation to a name, given the complexity of charsets involved. I don't even validate email addresses. I remember [this](https://www.netmeister.org/blog/email.html https://www.netmeister.org/blog/email.html) wonderful explainer of why your email validation regex is wrong.

nedt 2y ago
In HTML if you use <input type="email"> you basically get a regex validation. While it not fully follows the RFC it's a good middle ground. And it gives you an email that you can use on the internet (RFC obviously has some cases that are outside of this scope). That's why I tend to prefer what's defined in the standard: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/input.html#email-state-(type=email) https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/input.html#email-stat...
- deleted 2y ago
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imrejonk 2y ago

A 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.

account42 2y ago
It's only insulting if you want to be insulted. You'd do better learning to understand that its a computer system and not a personal attack.
- imrejonk 2y ago
  While I agree with you that an error message like this should not be taken as a personal attack, it still causes a horrible user experience. It’s not like the developers of these systems had no choice in the wording of these errors: they picked the insensitive computer-says-no option, while they could have went with an apologetic “Sorry, our system does not support special characters” instead.
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notanote 2y ago
That’s the best one of the lot. "Dein Name ist ungültig", "Your name is invalid", written with the informal word for "your".
- rossdavidh 2y ago
  They're trying to say that you and the server are very close friends, you see? No, no, I get this is not correct, just a joke...
  - account42 2y ago
    Formal pronouns in German are on their way out anyway, including in but not limited to software interfaces.

ginko 2y ago

Under 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_Brussels_-_2019/AR/1006 https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=Court_of_Appeal_of_Brusse...

xigoi 2y ago
This seems to only apply to banks.
- pornel 2y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if that created kafkaesque problems with other institutions that require name to match the bank account exactly, and break/reject non-ASCII at the same time.
  - robin_reala 2y ago
    I know an Åsa who became variously Åsa, Aasa and Asa after moving to a non-Scandinavian country. That took a while to untangle, and caused some of the problems you describe.
    - samatman 2y ago
      Spelled with an Angstrom, or with a Latin Capital Letter A With Ring Above?
      - robin_reala 2y ago
        The second. It’s the 27th letter of the Swedish alphabet.
- postepowanieadm 2y ago
  No, anywhere where your name is used.
- robin_reala 2y ago

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stop_nazi 2y ago

grzegorz brzęczyszczykiewicz

dvh 2y ago
Looks ok in my language: Gřegoř Bženčiščikievič
- postepowanieadm 2y ago
  You miss "ę"!
  - dvh 2y ago
    I don't think I did. I watched the video and this is the phonetic transcription. I hear b zh e n ch ...
    - int_19h 2y ago
      "ę" is not [e] followed by [n], it's a single nasalized vowel. Kinda like "ň" in Czech is not just [n] followed by [j], although it kinda sounds like that to people whose native language does not have a palatalized N sound.
nicbou 2y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U For the curious

Hackbraten 2y ago

Situations like these regularly make me feel ashamed about being a software developer.

jccalhoun 2y ago

My first name is hyphenated. I still find forms that reject it. My favorite was one that say "invalid first name."

Pesthuf 2y ago

I totally get that companies are probably more successful using simple validation rules, that work for the vast majority of names rather than just accepting everything just so that some person with no name or someone whose name cannot possibly be expressed or at least transliterated to Unicode can use their services. But that person's name has no business failing validation. They fucked up.

surfingdino 2y ago

I 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.

ACS_Solver 2y ago
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.

xyst 2y ago

Software has been gaslighting generations of people around the world. Side note: not a bad way to skirt surveillance though. A name like “stępień” will without a doubt have many ambiguous spellings across different intelligence gathering systems (RUMINT, OSINT, …). Americans will probably spell it as “Stefen” or “Steven” or “Stephen”, especially once communicated over phone.

philipwhiuk 2y ago
Turns out just foreign document is enough for that sometimes ;) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7899171.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7899171.stm

ljouhet 2y ago

Etheryte 2y ago
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.
- account42 2y ago
  It's not a fallback, it's the actual domain name.

powersnail 2y ago

As 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.

Muromec 2y ago
Okay, I have a non-ASCII (non Latin even) name, so I can tell. You just ask explicitly how my name is spelled in a bank system or my government id. Please don't try transliteration, unless you know exact rules the other system suggests to transliterate my name from the one cultural context into another and then still make it a suggestion and make it clear for which purpose it will be used (and then only use it for that purpose). And please please please, don't try to be smart and detect the cultural context from the character set before automatically translating it to another character set. It will go wrong and you will not notice for a long time, but people will make mean passive aggressive screenshots of your product too. My bank for example knows my legal name in Cyrillic, but will not print it on a card, so they make best-effort attempt to transliterate it to ASCII, but make it editable field and will ask me to confirm this is how I want it to be on a card.
matthewbauer 2y ago
You can just show the user the transliteration & have them confirm it makes sense. Always store the original version since you can't reverse the process. But you can compare the transliterated version to make sure it matches. Debit cards a pretty common example of this. I believe you can only have ASCII in the cardholder name field.
- Muromec 2y ago

wruza 2y ago

I'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.

Muromec 2y ago
>so he just selects a subset he can handle and bans everything else. Yes? And the problem is?
- throwaway290 2y ago
  The next guy with a different subset? :)
  - Muromec 2y ago
    The subset is mostly defined by the jurisdiction you operate in, which usually defines a process to map names from one subset to another and is also in the business of keeping the log of said operation. The problem is not operating in a subset, but defining it wrong and not being aware there are multiple of those. If different parts of your system operate in different jurisdictions (or interface which other systems that do), you have to pick multiple subsets and ask user to provide input for each of them. You just can't put anything other than ASCII into either payment card or PNR and the rules of minimal length will differ for the two and you can't put ASCII into the government database which explicitly rejects all of ASCII letters.
    - throwaway290 2y ago
      HN does not accept emoji because of jurisdiction huh?

josephcsible 2y ago

What would be wrong with "enter your name as it appears in the machine-readable zone of your passport" (or "would appear" for people who have never gotten one)? Isn't that the one standard format for names that actually is universal?

ahoka 2y ago
I would like to use my name as my parents gave it to me, thanks. Is that too much to ask for?
- account42 2y ago
  If your parents were smartasses, then yes.
- richardwhiuk 2y ago
  How much flexibility are we giving parents in what they name children? If a parent invented a totally new glyph, would supporting that be a requirement?
  - Muromec 2y ago
    Luckily, there is a vital records keeping office which already bothered to check with the law on that matter and if they can write it, so can you.
ks2048 2y ago
There's the problem that "appears" is a visible phenomenon and unicode strings can contain non-visible characters and multiple ways to represent the same visible information. Normalization is supposed to help here, but some sites may fail to do this or do incorrectly, etc.
- josephcsible 2y ago
  But the MRZ of a passport doesn't contain any of those problem characters.

gavinsyancey 2y ago

WTF-8 is actually a real encoding, used for encoding invalid UTF-16 unpaired surrogates for UTF-8 systems: https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/ https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/

bjackman 2y ago
I believe this is what Rust OsStrings are under the hood on Windows.
- extraduder_ire 2y ago
  Which I assume stands for "Windows-Transformation-Format-8(bits)".
  - mmoskal 2y ago
    Abstract WTF-8 (Wobbly Transformation Format − 8-bit) is a superset of UTF-8 that encodes surrogate code points if they are not in a pair.
    - hedora 2y ago
      Can you still assume the bytes 0x00 and 0xFF are not present in the string (like in UTF-8?)
      - int_19h 2y ago
        Yes. The only difference between UTF-8 and WTF-8 is that the latter does not reject otherwise valid UTF-8 byte sequences that correspond to codepoints in range U+D800 to U+DFFF (which means that, in practice, a lot of things that say they are UTF-8 are actually WTF-8).
        account42 2y ago
        Not really since you are unlikely to end up with unpaired surrogates outside of UTF-16 unless you explicitly implement a WTF-16 decoder - most other things are going to error out or remove/replace the garbage data when converting to another encoding. And if you convert valid UTF-16 by interpreting them as UCS-2 and then not check for invalid code points you are going to end up with either valid UTF-8 or something that isn't even valid WTF-8 since that encoding disallows paired surrogates to be encoded individually. WTF-16 is something that occurs naturally. WTF-8 isn't.

rurban 2y ago

Just use the unicode identifier rules, my libu8ident. https://github.com/rurban/libu8ident https://github.com/rurban/libu8ident Windows folks need to convert to UTF—8 first

philipwhiuk 2y ago
That's nice. Which restriction level handles all names?
- rurban 2y ago
  Every. Identifiers are identifiable names. Most languages with unicode name support only support symbols, ie not identifiable names (binary trash).

bawolff 2y ago

Its really not that hard though. PCRE regex support unicode letter classes. There is really no excuse for this type of issue.

cryptonector 2y ago
`..*` should be a good validation regexp. At that point you might as well check only that length is non-zero and the the name is valid Unicode and nothing more. Well, ok, maybe look at UTR-#36 and maybe disallow / filter out non-printing characters, PUCs, and what not.

kgeist 2y ago

My rule of thumb is to treat strings as opaque blobs most of the time. The only validation I'd always enforce is some sane length limit, to prevent users from shoving entire novels inside. If you treat your strings as opaque blobs, and use UTF8, most of internationalization problems go away. Imho often times, input validation is an attempt to solve a problem from the wrong side. Say, when XSS or SQL injections are found on a site, I've seen people's first reaction to be validation of user input by looking for "special symbols", or add a whitelist of allowed characters, instead of simply escaping strings right before rendering HTML (and modern frameworks do it automatically), or using parameterized queries if it's SQL. If a user wants to call themselves "alert('hello')", why not? Why the arbitrary limits? I think there're very few exceptions to this, probably something law-related, or if you have to interact with some legacy service.

kazinator 2y ago
> treat strings as opaque blobs most of the time While being transparent is great and better than stupidly mangling or rejecting data, the problem is that if we just pass through anything, there are situations and contexts in which some kinds of software could be used as part of a chain of deception involving Unicode/font tricks. Passing through is mostly good. Even in software that has to care about this, not every layer through which text passes should have the responsibility.
ddulaney 2y ago
There's at least one major exception to this: Unicode normalization. It's possible for the same logical character to have two different sets of code points (for example, a-with-umlaut as a single character, vs a followed by umlaut combining diacritic). Related, distinguishing between the "a" character in Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and the handful of other times it shows up throughout Unicode. This comes up in at least 3 ways: 1. A usability issue. It's not always easy to predict which identical-looking variant is produced by different input methods, so users enter the identical-looking characters on different devices but get an account not found error. 2. A security issue. If some of your backend systems handle these kinds of characters differently, that can cause all kinds of weird bugs, some of which can be exploited. 3. An abuse issue. If it's possible to create accounts with the same-looking name as others that aren't the same account, there can be vectors for impersonation, harassment, and other issues. So you have to make a policy choice about how to handle this problem. The only things that I've seen work are either restricting the allowed characters (often just to printable ASCII) or being very clear and strict about always performing one of the standard Unicode transformations. But doing that transformation consistently across a big codebase has some real challenges: in particular, it can change based on Unicode version, and guaranteeing that all potential services use the same Unicode version is really non-trivial. So lots of people make the (sensible) choice not to deal with it. But yeah, agreed that parenthesis should be OK.

hedora 2y ago

I’d expect iCloud to accept that name, even though Rachel True’s name breaks the heck out of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/lz27ou/she_has_true_as_her_last_name_and_that_breaks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/lz27ou/she...

dathinab 2y ago

fun fact there is a semi standard encoding called wtf-8 which is utf-8 extended in a way so that it can represent non well formed utf-16 (bad surrogate code points) it's used in situations like when a utf-8 based system has to interact with Windows file paths

rawbert 2y ago

OMG, the second screenshot might be actually the application i am working on right now ...

mdavid626 2y ago

It's like with phone numbers. Some people assume they contain only digits.

dcow 2y ago

Apropos: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

rmrfchik 2y ago

Well, the labels of input fields are written in English yet user enters his name in native language. What's the reason of having name at all? You can call the person by this name. But if I write you my name in my language, what you (not knowing how to read it) can do? Only "hey, still-don't-know-you, here is your info". In my foreign passport I have name __transliterated__ to Latin alphabet. Shouldn't this be the case for other places?

int_19h 2y ago
Unfortunately, the extremely weird and idiosyncratic use of Latin script for English means that straightforward transliterations are usually pronounced incorrectly by people who try to pronounce them according to English rules. And, on the other end of the spectrum, you have attempts to spell phonetically following English orthography, which then causes issues because it's tied to a particular dialect of English. E.g. the traditional Korean romanization of the name "Park" has "r" there solely so that "a" would actually correspond to an [a] sound in British English - but then, of course, American English is rhotic, and so it ends up being incorrectly pronounced as [park].
- account42 2y ago
  "Usually" it's pretty close to the correct pronounciation. Pretty much always it's good enough to be understandable.
smatija 2y ago
w3c recommends adding a separate field for pronounciation - see e.g. paragraph after second image in https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names#splitting https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names...
- rmrfchik 2y ago
  Wow, that's neat.

wvh 2y ago

There's little more you can do to validate a name internationally than to provide one textbox and check if it's a valid encoding of Unicode. Maybe you can exclude some control and graphical ranges at best. Of course there are valid concerns that international names should pass through e.g. local postal services, which would require at least some kind of Latinized representation of name and address. I suppose the Latin alphabet is the most convenient minimal common denominator across writing systems, even though I admit being Euro-centric.

egorfine 2y ago

Mandatory mention: https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings

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