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The number of times that a website rejects my first name because it has a hyphen in it, even in 2025, is astounding. I get told all manner of things by support

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

andrewmcwatters 2y ago
Same, as someone with two middle names. Both scenarios are very common.
- jihadjihad 2y ago
  I’ve wondered about this myself, though I only have one middle name. Do you typically enter both middle names into the “Middle Name” form field?
  - fallinghawks 2y ago
    Not the person you asked, but I also have a 2 word middle name. I enter both but it's a crapshoot as to whether it will take the first, the second, or both. I think a lot of older systems could handle 2 words in the first name (e.g. Joe Bob or Mary Ann) but not the middle.
  - fph 2y ago
    If your full name is John Charles Paul Jacob Smith, then by definition the middle name is "Paul" right?
    - Detrytus 2y ago
      So with even number of names there would be no middle name at all? :)
      - kmoser 2y ago
        Mr. T once joked that his first name was "Mr", his middle name was the period, and his last name was "T": https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10158317051194205 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10158317051194205
  - adonese 2y ago
    I have two middle names, in fact in my country legally we go with 4 names [first name, father's name, grandfather's name, and last name]. It is always a guess game when converting to only 2 names systems. In many cases I'd just go with my first name field including all of the first 3 names just to match the passport (especially for airflights booking).
  - jvvw 2y ago
    I have two and it has never been a big problem. Anything official will have a 'middle name(a)' section and you just put both in there. I think it is sufficiently common that official systems deal with it. I have occasionally had the second one dropped but not on anything very official.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kstrauser 2y ago
  I can beat this. My wife's maiden name was in the form "Jane Angela Smith". When we got married, she changed it to "Jane Smith Jones", first name Jane, middle name Smith, last name Jones. Someone at the Social Security Administration entered it into their database as first name "Jane", no middle name, last name "Smith Jones". Now, for fun, no one noticed this for about 25 years. Her Social Security card says "Jane Smith Jones". Her driver's license says "Jones, Jane Smith". Her US passport says "Jones, Jane Smith". But another part of the federal government says "Smith Jones, Jane". We only found this out when she tried to renew her driver's license recently and the clerk was like, "hey, this isn't matching up right...". A month later, the TSA clerk at the airport stopped her to ask why her passport didn't match her federal records. So now we're paying $400 to legally change her name from "Jane Smith Jones" to "Jane Smith Jones". That's what the notice they make you pay to run in the newspaper says, anyway.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    This is now my go to story about name nonsense for a while.
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      I think it's kind of hilarious even though it's an expensive pain in the neck. There's nothing we can do to make it go away on its own, so we might as well find the humor in it.
      - genewitch 2y ago
        i have a tangential story that i wonder how many entropy i'll leak telling it. My youngest, when he was born, was unable to get a birth certificate, and was listed as some last name that isn't the mom's or mine (it's because we couldn't track down her 15 year estranged "husband" and louisiana law is... French.) I had to do a paternity test, but that's it, other than hiring a lawyer. The lawyer pushed everything through. I don't "rightfully" own my last name (and i was the last one in the world, damnit!), so we told the lawyer to tell the state we wanted the mom's last name. It has much more known history to her and grandma, etc. I'm the only one in my tree, except the kid. anyhow the state said "NOPE, DAD'S LAST NAME" so now the kid, instead of being burdened with a last name that looks like a cat fell on your keyboard, has my last name, which is two words. which is apparently not fixed after me being around for 45 years, and my dad for like 20 years before that in the US. It seems like this is relatively critical stuff, you know? it can interfere with bank accounts, school financial support, taxes, retirement, and you won't know until you hit each obstacle.
- impossiblefork 2y ago
  or people whose middle name is their first name.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Hey, that's also relevant to me! I've checked my local laws, and where I live, your legal name is the one you consistently present yourself as. If you're Joe Frank Smith, and you go by Frank everywhere, that's your legal name. I've gotten so tired of having this argument. Inevitably some clerk will insist on calling me by my first name, "you know, your legal name". No. My middle name is my legal name. It's what my mom, sisters, wife, friends, teachers, coworkers, doctors, and everyone else call me. My first name is an aka at best, except the only people who insist on using it are ones wrong about the law, so I'm not even really "known as" it. I once closed a bank account 10 minutes after opening it because they insisted that my debit card be printed as "Joe Smith", not "Frank Smith". I told them I'd absolutely refuse to touch it because that's not my name. I find it interesting that it's mostly local orgs who are a pain in the neck about being wrong about this. You'd think a small local bank would know local law better than a huge multi-national, but the giant bank I opened a business account with was totally fine putting Frank Smith on my accounts. Go figure. (Somewhat related: That's made me super sympathetic to trans people who want to be known as something other than what's written on their birth certificate. Yeah, I get it. It's nails on a chalkboard when someone calls me Joe, so if you don't want people calling you Tammy anymore, I'm on your side.)
    - oskarw85 2y ago
      But how are all those people supposed to know that beforehand? Call yourself whatever you want but don't expect anyone to deal with your name-fuckery. It's called first name for a reason.
    - geoelectric 2y ago
      This is technically the law in California, too (and possibly that’s where you live) but in practice the ability to do common law name-change has been abolished at a bureaucratic level. Since at some point everything official now routes back to either a passport, an immigration/naturalization document, a court-issued name change doc, or a marriage certificate, those are effectively the only ways your name can be changed. The problem is that all the law can do is make it legal for you to use whatever without it being considered fraudulent to try. But if your law is like CA’s it doesn’t specify other institutions other than possibly state government ones have to honor that and, in particular, it can’t constrain the federal government at all. So that leaves the DMV as the one possibly effective way to do common law change, on the off chance somewhere will just accept your license as proof of identity. But now that driver’s licenses are subordinate to passport info or equivalent via Real ID, that route is pretty much toast too. You might still be able to get the alternative state-only DL / state ID with a common law name, and maybe open a bank account with that, but then the credit reporting companies (or Chexsystems) don’t have to honor it so you’re possibly screwed anyway. Plus without a Real ID you’ll have to show a passport to fly domestically, and that will have the name you don’t like. And, of course, none of this helps with your paycheck because you can’t satisfy an I-9 with a DL. It requires a federal document, too, which—if your state info doesn’t match your federal info—needs to be a fully identifying federal passport/equivalent. So even if you get the bank account with your chosen name, you might run into issues with your checks being to a different one. At this point, it’s just not worth trying common law name change anymore. You either flip a few hundred for the official change or you accept the fact that you’ll have a public name and a private name. (And I say this as a “Geo” who strongly dislikes seeing “George Jr” on stuff so I feel your pain. I just tell my employers that my given name only goes on paychecks, benefits, and tax forms, and is to never be used publicly. That has always worked.)
kiwijamo 2y ago
Indeed. My passport correctly includes the hyphen in my surname. Air New Zealand doesn't support spaces or hyphens so my surname is written out as both words concatenated (i.e. Onetwo). Qantas doesn't support hyphens but does support spaces so my surname is written out as two words (i.e. One Two). Thankfully apparently this is common enough that I've had tickets including travel on both airlines (as Qantas cancelled a flight and ticketed me on Air New Zealand instead) traveling internationally work just fine. Even things like the automated customs gates work fine. I suspect under the hood their systems just strips out all non-alpha characters and compares that (i.e. 'onetwo' == 'onetwo'). Online/moible forms can be an issue tho. Spark, the biggest mobile phone carrier in New Zealand, doesn't support hyphens in account names, just to name one silly example.
- CountHackulus 2y ago
  I've got the same problem with a hyphenated name, and it was always the way they phrased the error messages that annoyed me. Porter Airline's error message for the longest time was "Your Name is Invalid". No, my name is valid, your system doesn't support it. I ended up having to contact their support quite a few times for them to fix the error message. Still doesn't work, but at least the error message is reasonable now.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  > I suspect under the hood their systems just strips out all non-alpha characters and compares that (i.e. 'onetwo' == 'onetwo'). That would be the MRZ version. The identity page of your passport has a blob of monospace text at the bottom that's used as the 'canonical' version of names for most or all air travel systems.
- FridgeSeal 2y ago
  > Even things like the automated customs gates work fine. I would like to think (Perhaps naively?) that these systems key off your passport number/ID (which is by construction, not subject to these problems) to deliberately side-step issues like this.
- zerocrates 2y ago
  The airline/travel systems are full of this stuff. I have mostly documents that include my full middle name, and the way half or more of air travel systems deal with that is to just crunch the first and middle into one name. But: it all works fine.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
And the ones that are too incompetent to strip (or add) hyphens to phone numbers. Or handle single-digit month numbers in a date. Or...
dan_quixote 2y ago
My wife is Korean. The anglicized version of Korean given names always has a space in it. This makes for a few kinds of broken naming schemes - like removing the space or the second half of the given name becomes the middle name, or the second half of the given name just truncated entirely.
- kccqzy 2y ago
  In Singapore given names can have more than one space and may not be a substring of the full name. The first prime minister has the full name "Harry Lee Kuan Yew" where Lee is his family name and "Harry Kuan Yew" is his given name. (Later in life he dropped "Harry" from his name.)
  - decimalenough 2y ago
    To be more precise, many Singaporean Chinese names are formatted as WESTERN_NAME SURNAME CHINESE_FIRSTNAME_1 CHINESE_FIRSTNAME_PART2. The WESTERN_NAME may or may not be a legal name (AFAIK for Lee Kuan Yew it never was), and to further complicate things it's not unknown for the Chinese name to be duplicated in its dialect and Mandarin readings, leading to "Harry, Lee Kuan Yew (Li Guangyao)". Combine this with Anglocentric IT systems, and I'm sure Mr Lee (RIP) gets a lot of spam addressed to "Mr Yew".
    - paulmooreparks 2y ago
      I get this in reverse. My surname is Parks, and my given names are Paul Moore. Since moving to Singapore I've become accustomed to answering to "Parks Paul Moore" in person or on the phone. Surprisingly, local systems outside of the SG government can still take a maddeningly Western approach to names (First name/last name, assumption that last name is a family name a not a patronymic, etc.). My wife is Singaporean Tamil, so her "last name" is actually her father's given name, and even when travelling around Southeast Asia she encounters issues with this. Fortunately, the SG government does an admirable job of handling Chinese names (across a number of languages and cultures), Malay names, Indian names of various cultures (mostly Tamil, but also Punjabi, Malayalam, and several others) and of course many Western names. I wish the Western world would catch up.
muzani 2y ago
Some people here have an apostrophe. Names like Ainul can be 'Ainul. And I guess the Bobby Tables equivalent is Ai'null. It's due to arabic sources, where A and A' are different letters like o and ö. I used to do some consulting for the home ministry, and these legal names are all over our databases. I imagine apostrophes would be a complete nightmare for most countries to sanitize or validate.
Marsymars 2y ago
I legally changed my name to drop the hyphen. I kept an accented character, but don't use it for legal documents or plane tickets.
halper 2y ago
It drives me mad when various forms sternly requires me to enter my name "as it is spelled in the passport" only to tell me that my name is "invalid" or "incorrect" or "not allowed". Then we have the systems that have non-standard transliteration rules … I have never been known by more than one name, but the spelling sure differs.
- wodenokoto 2y ago
  It's annoying that airlines writes "as spelled in passport", when what they really need is an upper case alpha-only version of your name. But it is also equally annoying that passports don't clearly spell out a "international and systems compatible" version of your name. We've had Airlines for way over half a century, and visas for about as long as we have had passports and people still walk around with international identification documents that cannot be understood by travel and immigration agencies internationally.
  - lmz 2y ago
    > But it is also equally annoying that passports don't clearly spell out a "international and systems compatible" version of your name. They do in the machine readable area. Maybe not "clearly".
    - fxtentacle 2y ago
      The passport machine area replaces Ö with O but most German airlines replace Ö with OE.
  - Aaargh20318 2y ago
    What they probably mean is the name as it’s spelled in the MRZ (the ‘Machine Readable Zone’, the two lines at the bottom of the passport), which is also stored in data group 1 in the embedded chip. Passports can also contain the full name in UTF-8 in data group 11, but this is an optional field. The MRZ can only contain the characters A-Z (uppercase), 0-9 and <. ICAO document 9303-3 describes conventions for transliteration of other characters into this limited character set.
dkga 2y ago
I‘m laughing in Brazilian… we (and certainly my case) tend to have so many family names plus particles (like „de“ or „junior“) that often the full name does not fit in forms, which leads to cropping my family name(s) or removing spaces, sometimes both. And then in some forms such as airlines where the family name is the username I have to try a few different combinations to „guess“ which is the one the airline‘s systems used for me.
walrus01 2y ago
There's a number of websites and forms that reject entire domain names for email that have a hyphen in it, despite a hyphen being perfectly valid in modern DNS usage and domain names in every ICANN TLD.

andrewmcwatters 2y ago

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

jihadjihad 2y ago
I’ve wondered about this myself, though I only have one middle name. Do you typically enter both middle names into the “Middle Name” form field?
- fallinghawks 2y ago
  Not the person you asked, but I also have a 2 word middle name. I enter both but it's a crapshoot as to whether it will take the first, the second, or both. I think a lot of older systems could handle 2 words in the first name (e.g. Joe Bob or Mary Ann) but not the middle.
- fph 2y ago
  If your full name is John Charles Paul Jacob Smith, then by definition the middle name is "Paul" right?
  - Detrytus 2y ago
    So with even number of names there would be no middle name at all? :)
    - kmoser 2y ago
      Mr. T once joked that his first name was "Mr", his middle name was the period, and his last name was "T": https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10158317051194205 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10158317051194205
- adonese 2y ago
  I have two middle names, in fact in my country legally we go with 4 names [first name, father's name, grandfather's name, and last name]. It is always a guess game when converting to only 2 names systems. In many cases I'd just go with my first name field including all of the first 3 names just to match the passport (especially for airflights booking).
- jvvw 2y ago
  I have two and it has never been a big problem. Anything official will have a 'middle name(a)' section and you just put both in there. I think it is sufficiently common that official systems deal with it. I have occasionally had the second one dropped but not on anything very official.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kstrauser 2y ago
I can beat this. My wife's maiden name was in the form "Jane Angela Smith". When we got married, she changed it to "Jane Smith Jones", first name Jane, middle name Smith, last name Jones. Someone at the Social Security Administration entered it into their database as first name "Jane", no middle name, last name "Smith Jones". Now, for fun, no one noticed this for about 25 years. Her Social Security card says "Jane Smith Jones". Her driver's license says "Jones, Jane Smith". Her US passport says "Jones, Jane Smith". But another part of the federal government says "Smith Jones, Jane". We only found this out when she tried to renew her driver's license recently and the clerk was like, "hey, this isn't matching up right...". A month later, the TSA clerk at the airport stopped her to ask why her passport didn't match her federal records. So now we're paying $400 to legally change her name from "Jane Smith Jones" to "Jane Smith Jones". That's what the notice they make you pay to run in the newspaper says, anyway.
- genewitch 2y ago
  This is now my go to story about name nonsense for a while.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    I think it's kind of hilarious even though it's an expensive pain in the neck. There's nothing we can do to make it go away on its own, so we might as well find the humor in it.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      i have a tangential story that i wonder how many entropy i'll leak telling it. My youngest, when he was born, was unable to get a birth certificate, and was listed as some last name that isn't the mom's or mine (it's because we couldn't track down her 15 year estranged "husband" and louisiana law is... French.) I had to do a paternity test, but that's it, other than hiring a lawyer. The lawyer pushed everything through. I don't "rightfully" own my last name (and i was the last one in the world, damnit!), so we told the lawyer to tell the state we wanted the mom's last name. It has much more known history to her and grandma, etc. I'm the only one in my tree, except the kid. anyhow the state said "NOPE, DAD'S LAST NAME" so now the kid, instead of being burdened with a last name that looks like a cat fell on your keyboard, has my last name, which is two words. which is apparently not fixed after me being around for 45 years, and my dad for like 20 years before that in the US. It seems like this is relatively critical stuff, you know? it can interfere with bank accounts, school financial support, taxes, retirement, and you won't know until you hit each obstacle.
impossiblefork 2y ago
or people whose middle name is their first name.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Hey, that's also relevant to me! I've checked my local laws, and where I live, your legal name is the one you consistently present yourself as. If you're Joe Frank Smith, and you go by Frank everywhere, that's your legal name. I've gotten so tired of having this argument. Inevitably some clerk will insist on calling me by my first name, "you know, your legal name". No. My middle name is my legal name. It's what my mom, sisters, wife, friends, teachers, coworkers, doctors, and everyone else call me. My first name is an aka at best, except the only people who insist on using it are ones wrong about the law, so I'm not even really "known as" it. I once closed a bank account 10 minutes after opening it because they insisted that my debit card be printed as "Joe Smith", not "Frank Smith". I told them I'd absolutely refuse to touch it because that's not my name. I find it interesting that it's mostly local orgs who are a pain in the neck about being wrong about this. You'd think a small local bank would know local law better than a huge multi-national, but the giant bank I opened a business account with was totally fine putting Frank Smith on my accounts. Go figure. (Somewhat related: That's made me super sympathetic to trans people who want to be known as something other than what's written on their birth certificate. Yeah, I get it. It's nails on a chalkboard when someone calls me Joe, so if you don't want people calling you Tammy anymore, I'm on your side.)
  - oskarw85 2y ago
    But how are all those people supposed to know that beforehand? Call yourself whatever you want but don't expect anyone to deal with your name-fuckery. It's called first name for a reason.
  - geoelectric 2y ago
    This is technically the law in California, too (and possibly that’s where you live) but in practice the ability to do common law name-change has been abolished at a bureaucratic level. Since at some point everything official now routes back to either a passport, an immigration/naturalization document, a court-issued name change doc, or a marriage certificate, those are effectively the only ways your name can be changed. The problem is that all the law can do is make it legal for you to use whatever without it being considered fraudulent to try. But if your law is like CA’s it doesn’t specify other institutions other than possibly state government ones have to honor that and, in particular, it can’t constrain the federal government at all. So that leaves the DMV as the one possibly effective way to do common law change, on the off chance somewhere will just accept your license as proof of identity. But now that driver’s licenses are subordinate to passport info or equivalent via Real ID, that route is pretty much toast too. You might still be able to get the alternative state-only DL / state ID with a common law name, and maybe open a bank account with that, but then the credit reporting companies (or Chexsystems) don’t have to honor it so you’re possibly screwed anyway. Plus without a Real ID you’ll have to show a passport to fly domestically, and that will have the name you don’t like. And, of course, none of this helps with your paycheck because you can’t satisfy an I-9 with a DL. It requires a federal document, too, which—if your state info doesn’t match your federal info—needs to be a fully identifying federal passport/equivalent. So even if you get the bank account with your chosen name, you might run into issues with your checks being to a different one. At this point, it’s just not worth trying common law name change anymore. You either flip a few hundred for the official change or you accept the fact that you’ll have a public name and a private name. (And I say this as a “Geo” who strongly dislikes seeing “George Jr” on stuff so I feel your pain. I just tell my employers that my given name only goes on paychecks, benefits, and tax forms, and is to never be used publicly. That has always worked.)

kiwijamo 2y ago

Indeed. My passport correctly includes the hyphen in my surname. Air New Zealand doesn't support spaces or hyphens so my surname is written out as both words concatenated (i.e. Onetwo). Qantas doesn't support hyphens but does support spaces so my surname is written out as two words (i.e. One Two). Thankfully apparently this is common enough that I've had tickets including travel on both airlines (as Qantas cancelled a flight and ticketed me on Air New Zealand instead) traveling internationally work just fine. Even things like the automated customs gates work fine. I suspect under the hood their systems just strips out all non-alpha characters and compares that (i.e. 'onetwo' == 'onetwo'). Online/moible forms can be an issue tho. Spark, the biggest mobile phone carrier in New Zealand, doesn't support hyphens in account names, just to name one silly example.

CountHackulus 2y ago
I've got the same problem with a hyphenated name, and it was always the way they phrased the error messages that annoyed me. Porter Airline's error message for the longest time was "Your Name is Invalid". No, my name is valid, your system doesn't support it. I ended up having to contact their support quite a few times for them to fix the error message. Still doesn't work, but at least the error message is reasonable now.
crooked-v 2y ago
> I suspect under the hood their systems just strips out all non-alpha characters and compares that (i.e. 'onetwo' == 'onetwo'). That would be the MRZ version. The identity page of your passport has a blob of monospace text at the bottom that's used as the 'canonical' version of names for most or all air travel systems.
FridgeSeal 2y ago
> Even things like the automated customs gates work fine. I would like to think (Perhaps naively?) that these systems key off your passport number/ID (which is by construction, not subject to these problems) to deliberately side-step issues like this.
zerocrates 2y ago
The airline/travel systems are full of this stuff. I have mostly documents that include my full middle name, and the way half or more of air travel systems deal with that is to just crunch the first and middle into one name. But: it all works fine.

DidYaWipe 2y ago

And the ones that are too incompetent to strip (or add) hyphens to phone numbers. Or handle single-digit month numbers in a date. Or...

dan_quixote 2y ago

My wife is Korean. The anglicized version of Korean given names always has a space in it. This makes for a few kinds of broken naming schemes - like removing the space or the second half of the given name becomes the middle name, or the second half of the given name just truncated entirely.

kccqzy 2y ago
In Singapore given names can have more than one space and may not be a substring of the full name. The first prime minister has the full name "Harry Lee Kuan Yew" where Lee is his family name and "Harry Kuan Yew" is his given name. (Later in life he dropped "Harry" from his name.)
- decimalenough 2y ago
  To be more precise, many Singaporean Chinese names are formatted as WESTERN_NAME SURNAME CHINESE_FIRSTNAME_1 CHINESE_FIRSTNAME_PART2. The WESTERN_NAME may or may not be a legal name (AFAIK for Lee Kuan Yew it never was), and to further complicate things it's not unknown for the Chinese name to be duplicated in its dialect and Mandarin readings, leading to "Harry, Lee Kuan Yew (Li Guangyao)". Combine this with Anglocentric IT systems, and I'm sure Mr Lee (RIP) gets a lot of spam addressed to "Mr Yew".
  - paulmooreparks 2y ago
    I get this in reverse. My surname is Parks, and my given names are Paul Moore. Since moving to Singapore I've become accustomed to answering to "Parks Paul Moore" in person or on the phone. Surprisingly, local systems outside of the SG government can still take a maddeningly Western approach to names (First name/last name, assumption that last name is a family name a not a patronymic, etc.). My wife is Singaporean Tamil, so her "last name" is actually her father's given name, and even when travelling around Southeast Asia she encounters issues with this. Fortunately, the SG government does an admirable job of handling Chinese names (across a number of languages and cultures), Malay names, Indian names of various cultures (mostly Tamil, but also Punjabi, Malayalam, and several others) and of course many Western names. I wish the Western world would catch up.

muzani 2y ago

Some people here have an apostrophe. Names like Ainul can be 'Ainul. And I guess the Bobby Tables equivalent is Ai'null. It's due to arabic sources, where A and A' are different letters like o and ö. I used to do some consulting for the home ministry, and these legal names are all over our databases. I imagine apostrophes would be a complete nightmare for most countries to sanitize or validate.

Marsymars 2y ago

I legally changed my name to drop the hyphen. I kept an accented character, but don't use it for legal documents or plane tickets.

halper 2y ago

It drives me mad when various forms sternly requires me to enter my name "as it is spelled in the passport" only to tell me that my name is "invalid" or "incorrect" or "not allowed". Then we have the systems that have non-standard transliteration rules … I have never been known by more than one name, but the spelling sure differs.

wodenokoto 2y ago
It's annoying that airlines writes "as spelled in passport", when what they really need is an upper case alpha-only version of your name. But it is also equally annoying that passports don't clearly spell out a "international and systems compatible" version of your name. We've had Airlines for way over half a century, and visas for about as long as we have had passports and people still walk around with international identification documents that cannot be understood by travel and immigration agencies internationally.
- lmz 2y ago
  > But it is also equally annoying that passports don't clearly spell out a "international and systems compatible" version of your name. They do in the machine readable area. Maybe not "clearly".
  - fxtentacle 2y ago
    The passport machine area replaces Ö with O but most German airlines replace Ö with OE.
- Aaargh20318 2y ago
  What they probably mean is the name as it’s spelled in the MRZ (the ‘Machine Readable Zone’, the two lines at the bottom of the passport), which is also stored in data group 1 in the embedded chip. Passports can also contain the full name in UTF-8 in data group 11, but this is an optional field. The MRZ can only contain the characters A-Z (uppercase), 0-9 and <. ICAO document 9303-3 describes conventions for transliteration of other characters into this limited character set.

dkga 2y ago

I‘m laughing in Brazilian… we (and certainly my case) tend to have so many family names plus particles (like „de“ or „junior“) that often the full name does not fit in forms, which leads to cropping my family name(s) or removing spaces, sometimes both. And then in some forms such as airlines where the family name is the username I have to try a few different combinations to „guess“ which is the one the airline‘s systems used for me.

walrus01 2y ago

There's a number of websites and forms that reject entire domain names for email that have a hyphen in it, despite a hyphen being perfectly valid in modern DNS usage and domain names in every ICANN TLD.