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A comment on "@" on Twitter. Parent comment

Re:"@" on Twitter by sulam on Saturday April 28, 2018 @01:19AM (#16946175)
Classic! We named our guild in EQ "NULL", as a joke. People would comment that we had a problem when they saw us running around with "<NULL>" running over our head. It bit us on the ass when someone went to Sony's EQ con one year, and they literally couldn't print out their badge because "your guild name is NULL? Really?"
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Re:"@" on Twitter by oneeyedpigeon on Saturday April 28, 2018 @05:19AM (#16946804)
> they literally couldn't print out their badge

I still don't quite get how this doesn't work. Why are they handling "NULL" as a special case? What's coercing "NULL" into null?

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Re:"@" on Twitter by sulam on Saturday April 28, 2018 @11:39AM (#16948147)
It was due to the way they exported the data. They used a SQL statement, and if you weren’t in a guild then the SQL would produce NULL. That output was then used to generate PDF badges, and it tried to do some filtering for NULL guilds. The person writing that script clearly did not anticipate there actually being a guild named NULL.
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Re:"@" on Twitter by drb91 on Saturday April 28, 2018 @12:13PM (#16948285)
NULL or ‘NULL’? There’s a clear and obvious difference there.
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Re:"@" on Twitter by kalleboo on Sunday April 29, 2018 @10:13AM (#16952066)
Unless you're using ColdFusion https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-to-pass-null...
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Re:"@" on Twitter by T2_t2 on Saturday April 28, 2018 @06:22AM (#16946985)
Bad coding.
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Re:"@" on Twitter by dyukqu on Saturday April 28, 2018 @06:48AM (#16947063)
It reminded me of a Wired article from 2015 about a guy with the last name "Null" - https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/
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