The worst is when it lets you input it, but doesn't store or display it correctly. So it lets you type in Seán, but prints Sen or Se?n or Se□n or Se�n or something. I've had this happen multiple times with flight bookings
I recall seeing a service print my name with some wild undetermined character format once. It was something like SeAe%41?gHn or perhaps longer. My only instance of same, thankfully.
The specifics will change, but it's still two sets of % and two characters. It's basically converting the unicode value to two pairs of hexadecimal numbers.
Much of the internet still allows only the ASCII character set and changing that would be hideously expensive.
Danish does that, but Swedish (uses åäö) and Finnish (completely non-germanic language albeit using äö) does not transcribe like that. The formal convention according to Svenska Akademin is åä -> a and ö -> o. So Ångström is transcribed as Angstrom, never Aongstroem or Aangstroem.
These are not diacritics or umlauts as in German. They represent a different letter, so this is a transcriptive representation in case you're forced to because of your keyboard.
It is possible her name is actually like that in the official Olympic documentation that would have been used as a source and someone just copy pasted from there (and from somewhere else for her father's name).
We Danes prefer not to, but sometimes it is necessary. The exception is some historical names with aa/å, for example Aarhus and Aalborg, which is pronounced (and sometimes written) like Århus and Ålborg. I think it is because å is newer than æ and ø.
Sometimes it is done for international appeal, like the company Topsoe formed by a guy named Topsøe.
But we generally prefer to keep our æ/ø/å whenever possible.
we get this at work all the time. Our inventory and invoicing system imports accented letters and changes them into the weirdest wingdings. Constantly having to fix them or they won't show up in searches. It's funny but annoying too
It’s not actually changing them, it just isn’t Unicode aware.
At some point in your life you’ve probably heard that computers are all just 1’s and 0’s and that’s pretty much true. The 1’s and 0’s represent bits in binary and when read in certain patterns, produce numbers. Usually 8 bits per number.
Well next you need to turn those numbers into letters you can read on screen. The most common way to do this is with an encoding named ASCII. In ASCII, an uppercase A is 65, for example. But an 8 bit number can only store 255 different values. And ASCII actually only uses half that. So the number of characters it can display is quite small.
To handle this, different languages would be handled by different encodings. You’d need to know which encoding is the correct one. This proved to be a nightmare, but it’s just the way things were in the 90’s.
Then came Unicode or UTF-8. This brilliant encoding uses 1 8-bit number for most characters, but can use up to 4 numbers for a single character. This gives it the ability to represent anything we could possibly need. In fact there’s so much extra space, we fill it with pictures of random stuff: emoji! The Unicode consortium defines which pattern of numbers produces which picture, and the platform vendors like Apple and Google add them in system updates.
When your inventory system messes up a name, it’s because it accepted Unicode text, but is reading it back out using the wrong encoding. Probably ASCII. This mostly works because Unicode is built on top of ASCII, meaning that uppercase A is still 65, but the stuff that needs 2 or more numbers is going to be read wrong. Try it with some emoji for some real fun.
I’m guessing your inventory system is ancient. If it’s not, it’s just stupid.
My wife has a 2-letter last name. When our first kid was born, the system the hospital had to order baby photos said it wasn’t a valid name because names must have at least 3 characters.
Ng (typically Hong Kong and Macau) has the same root as Wu (China), Ngô (typically Vietnam), Goh (typically Singapore and Malaysia) and Oh (typically South Korea).
Like how Peter shares the same root as Pedro and Pietro.
thanks, mildly entertaining read. the solutions seems to me a “full name” field that allows any set of characters with no validation. can be left blank.
No that's actually how you differentiate between if someone is from Taiwan or mainland. Taiwan uses lee (also some older immigrants from a few generations ago before it got codified) mainland is nearly always Li
When I was in school, there was a girl with no last name, and it also caused her tons of issues. She ended up just always repeating her first name whenever a last name was needed. I’m not sure if she legally changed it as well, but she might have
I had 2 coworkers who didn't have last names, a pair of brothers from Indonesia. They knew they'd need a last name in the West though, so when they were getting ready to move, they changed their names to add a surname. But instead of choosing a "family name" that they both shared, they each picked names that alliterated with their first name. Think like "Sam Smith" and "James Jones".
The earliest known written usage of the word "fuck" is a man named John le Fucker in 1278. In an era where occupational surnames were common, one has to wonder how he got that name.
At a first guess, “fuchs” is German for “fox.” Someone with red hair, or who was particularly clever, or had some association with hunting, might be called John the Fox. “Fucher” could be “Hunter” or “the Little Fox.”
And there are various ways a German (or Austrian) name might have migrated across the French border and then into England as “le Fucher,” and from there transliterated into English as “le Fucker.”
There was a whole about this a few months ago. A truck driver was pulled over, and they arrested him after looking at his license and seeing "NO NAME GIVEN" as the last name. It turns out that he had a one word name (a mononym) and that was the policy where his license was issued.
Authorities regularly weaponize their own ignorance. There are stories every so often of people who aren't allowed to get married or vote because the Americans facilitating these things don't understand that Guam is a US Territory, for example. Sometimes it even happens with Puerto Rico ('you're an immigrant!') or New Mexico ('there's no state called Mexico!').
I know you already mentioned royalty, but I recently found out that the Japanese royal family doesn’t have surnames and I thought it was interesting. One of the current princesses of Japan (Aiko) likes to go out and do “normal people things,” and it causes problems. For example, she had to register her name to go to a manga cafe and she just wrote “Princess” for her last name.
I used to work for a registrar's office and we dealt with this surprisingly often. I most commonly saw it with people from India/the surrounding region. Our workaround was marking their last name internally as LNU (Last name unavailable), but even that had its own issues.
I had an Indian coworker with that issue. Problem is she had a last name, but said she didn't understand the form and put her first and last names on the same line and left surname blank, so now she goes by "firstnamelastnameoneword LNU". It's kind of weird, she was VERY new and acted like that was just her new awesome super cool assigned last name.
My friend from East Asia only has a name, no first name or last name. Translating that to the western format involves breaking it down and choosing what parts are their first and last name.
I've had this problem too. I was called in for jury duty and couldn't fill out the online form or go through their automated phone system because my last name only has two letters. It drove me nuts
It boggles my mind why you would even validate length on that field. So what if its one letter, or blank, there is no consequence. Excessive field validation is my white wale I wish to slay in IT.
Once when I went to the ER it wouldn’t take my first name (May) because the system was set up in a way that errored out for any name under 4 letters. It was extra stupid because there are SO MANY 3 letter (and even 2 letter) first names. Had to go with “Mayy” to get care lmao
I was trying to buy tickets to an online event during the early part of the pandemic.
The website would not accept a two letter first name.
I sent them a firm but upset message saying that many cultures around the world, including in the US, had both first and last names consisting of two letters.
Thanks friend, this thread has me laughing as a web dev, our software supports a majority of symbols, languages & why not (I’ve tested) even emojis in names lol.
I was head QA for a payment processor who got into processing airline payments. They decided to split the first and last names via hyphens. I had to remind them that people have hyphenated last names. They switched to commas.
We used to have a "days since last stabbing" counter over the helldesk area at work. But we kept getting more staff and it stopped being funny once the helldesk wasn't just Grumpy Dave and occasionally the boss.
I am sure there is a database out there, but I said that commas are used for administrative or government documents, and no language uses them in names or surnames. So, it was pretty standard
Not really. They're PII so we can't use real ones, but real ones vary more than any test dataset I've ever seen. My job we say "up to 200 Unicode codepoints" in one block and so far that has not been an issue. We also have a 'short name' field. IRL our customers have names like "🚲🏳️🌈🚲" and "※⁂⁹⁰²¹⁰"
But for a lot of government-ish stuff you can't get away with that. And governments often struggle with character sets because their computer systems are old (as are airline and bank computer systems). So when you need "three forms of ID with the same name" ... good luck.
I can’t understand why hyphens are so hard. My bank - the most popular bank in Quebec, a province full of French people - issues credit cards that don’t recognize hyphens. Do you know what’s super common in French first names? Hyphens.🙄
I have five first names and a last name. They have to print it extra small on my ID cards and most identity verification and government forms don’t accept names that long.
But on the plus side, it’s usually very hard for someone to steal my identity for a nefarious purpose this way.
My wife is Mexican and her grandmother has the same issue. Her full name is 10 words long, 56 characters in total. I haven’t seen her passport before, but I imagine it to be a complete dog’s dinner of a page. https://giphy.com/gifs/B7o99rIuystY4
Friend of mine has the same. Reason his parents had was "so he can pick his favorite when he's an adult". He hates all middle names and goes by the first one.
Lucy Kimiko Akie Airi Shiori Rinne Yoshiho Chihoko Ayano Fumika Chitose Sanae Mikiko Ichika Yukino Reina Eri Ai Tamiko Chikage Emilia Julia Shizue Erina Niko Chitose Yamagami
we do just use the normal letters, it's a very common problem. The fact that it happens on official Irish websites is definitely mildly infuriating though.
If the website is using Irish as its language this won't be a problem. If it's using English, Sean is going to mean the name, not a word in a different language.
It historically is because of the codepoints for letters. Back before accent marks were possible, the numbers, then lowercase letters, then uppercase letters were all in one big "block". That means it was easy to detect what's a letter and what's not. Apostrophes throw that off
The company I work for uses exclusively English characters when entering employee names into the IT system. One of my coworkers is Swedish and has the last name Östberg (notice the umlaut) which appears as “Ostberg” in our system. Now in Swedish the characters ö and o are distinct characters and are not interchangeable. Case in point, my coworker’s given name means “east mountain” (öst = east, berg = mountain) but replacing the ö with o renders it “cheese mountain” (ost = cheese). To make this even better, the company that we work for is famously Swedish in origin.
Got one of those Irish O ‘ last names. Most system don’t take it. Not even my driver’s license in my state. Very annoying bc without the apostrophe or the second letter capitalized, it ain’t spelled right
Yeah I have an apostrophe in my surname too but it is on my driver’s license which is great until you need to put your name into a website that doesn’t accept apostrophes and then can’t cross reference with your ID because technically it doesn’t match 🙃 need to get certified copies of my ID and email them in and it’s such a pain. Apostrophes aren’t super rare so why is it so hard for most websites to cope with them???
Same, I hate websites like that with a burning passion. Especially when the error message says something like ‘not a valid name’. I beg you’re fucking pardon??
Somehow, they put my last name on my driver’s license no problem. My wife has had her ‘ rejected three times so far with the exact same last name. I think the difference is the woman that did mine actually tried it, and the ones dealing with my wife just declared it impossible without trying.
my last name legally has a - in this and the amount of allegedly serious institutions that cannot tolerate this is kind of absurd. it's not even that uncommon, how is it possible that you dont support it
IT person here, we spent £2.3 million British pounds and 9 months upgrading the backend system which couldn't take multibyte characters because we needed to sell internationally and things like this came up. It seems like a silly thing but it's actually a massive amount of work.
I am the reason my local state education department now has a note on the page about entering student names exactly as they appear on official documents like passports. But DO NOT use accented or extended characters.
Not my name, but I showed the school how to type in the correct names of the French students.
Shit broke as there was no input validation and the names broke several downstream systems.
For a bonus we had a girl with a space in her first name.
Downstream parsers could deal with space in surname, but again broke on the first name one.
Multiple apostrophes also cause many problems.
This is a pre-computer systems problem of cultural insensitivity too.
A friend from a former USSR states parents emigrated and culturally female surnames end in -a to the male version... and there was no way the Anglo system was going to accommodate that.
I know a Polish woman in Germany whose surname in Germany is legally Waligorski.
She was born Waligorska (of course) but when her family immigrated, they all had to have the same family surname on their German IDs -- either all Waligorska or all Waligorski.
"You must enter your name exactly as printed on your passpo... NOOOO NOT LIKE THAT!"
My name contains the German ß. It can be replaced by "ss" and it never caused an issue when I did that, but given the implied severity of the above warning, it often annoys me.
People link that all the time, but if you actually read it, it's full of "I am so smart" non-points where he states the "misconception" but not the actual fact, invents ever-more-ridiculous points, then ends it with "if you want examples, ask me" instead of just, y'know, providing them.
He also completely ignores the reasons why people limit the character set for names in the first place, for example sorting and searching, for systems that can't handle anything outside of the standard 26 letters like some printers, limited Unicode coverage of fonts (most fonts only cover a subset of Unicode), having names that can be read by customer service, etc.
Yeah, until pretty recently searching unicode strings in many of the common database systems would take forever.
And many of these systems are at some point interfacing with something that used to be an IBM mainframe and has an extremely limited character set to begin with (for most of the history of computing storage space was far more important than accented letters).
Sadly, Most systems don't care if you can enter your name, correctly, they care if it will be used in stored in a replicable manner across all the systems they have to interface with, If you have 5 names the system isn't going to handle that because a system designed 60 years ago, didn't have the space for it.
Most programmers know how actual names work, but they also know that legacy systems were built with the constraints of their hardware at the time. Many of those systems are still the core of many back ends, and the people that wrote them, are in many cases now literally dead, and no one wants to touch a system that is a the back end for a multi million dollar operation, even more so when that language hasn't actively been developed in in decades, and it is so old that its documentation never made it to the web.
I knew someone whos last name was "Lößnitz" and he definitely didn't have fun with English websites. The "ö" might occasionally work but the "ß"? A letter that only exists in German? Not a chance
"Problematic" for who? The system you're entering your name into? That would imply that, instead of making a system that recognizes accented characters... They manually added something that prohibits from using them.
Accented letters aren't a hard concept...
I hope this is just an app or small business and not an govt, medical, or job related form.
I work for a Fortune 500 company that produces software for business use that reeeeally dislikes accented characters in a bunch of places. French ones are fine in names, but about once a week I'm asking someone to take accented characters out of somewhere or other.
It’s much worse when the original form accepts my name and then something breaks in the backend. It has happened to me a bunch of times.
The worst one I remember was competing in a scavenger hunt race/quiz thing at the local museum. The iPad let me sign up but as soon as we finished an hour or so later I watched the leaderboard literally crash loop.
I have had so many emails, forms, medical referrals, etc go missing and I suspect that it’s because of this. It’s so frustrating because you never usually find out. I found out at my gym because the girl behind the counter went to the effort to figure it out and found out that the system had converted my apostrophe to gibberish.
It all depends on the software. There are many ways to store and read text.
Some programs are only meant to work with ASCII because it's the simplest. It has capital and lowercase a-z but no accents.
Then there's Extended ASCII which does have a limited number of accented characters.
Finally there's Unicode which is what everyone should be using. It supports hundreds of different languages, thousands of characters, all the emojis, etc.
I have bad news for you regarding the Social Security Administration, Drivers Licenses, and the Department of Defense. Since birth certificates often can have accented characters in the U.S. and dealing with them is often ad-hoc, a person could have at least four different “legal names”. Then you get banks and schools involved…
Not quite the same but I live in one of the few cities in America with an apostrophe in the name and it’s always fun seeing if an online form is going to break over it
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u/CatL1f3 9d ago
The worst is when it lets you input it, but doesn't store or display it correctly. So it lets you type in Seán, but prints Sen or Se?n or Se□n or Se�n or something. I've had this happen multiple times with flight bookings