Re:People with names that break computers
by snacksthecat on Friday March 25, 2016 @10:47AM
(#11360324)
My cousins have given up and changed their name from O'Keefe to OKeefe to avoid the single quote headache that seems to plague a lot of systems.
An alternative which is truer to the original would be to use Ó. It means 'grandson of'. But perhaps the other part should also be "deanglicized", giving either Ó Caoimh or Ó Cuív.
Re:People with names that break computers
by lostlogin on Friday March 25, 2016 @03:06PM
(#11361998)
By deed poll or just by filling in the form differently? The idea of having to fill in the "have you ever been known by another name" section on forms just looks like a world of pain.
It's a way to mitigate sql injection attacks when you don't want to pay for a rewrite of the data layer to not communicate with the database by blindly mashing strings together.
And don't get me started if your name can't be written in US-ASCII, i.e. if it has weird squiggles above or below the characters or if it's written in gasp cyrillic.
The first job I took in IT, after graduating with a liberal arts degree, was in software testing for a company that made point-of-sale systems. Only a month or two out of training I was given the task to test a name and address form. Knowing that quotes were special characters in databases, I tried entering something like O'Connell as a last name. Sure enough, the system broke. I remember filing a snarky bug report about how Irish and Arab people ought to be able to use the form.
My point is that testing for quotes and "Null" as a surname isn't some kind of esoteric science. What's wrong with people!