What is that, some kinda crazy-8 or what?

“Ø is a letter used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Southern Sámi languages. It is mostly used as a representation of mid front rounded vowels.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98

Friendly reminder that if op decides to allow more special characters in the name fields, they should check it does not open a stored XSS vulnerability. (Names are displayed to all site viewers on the predictions page.)

Also, just because it's a pet peeve - Last and/or Family names are not universal. Plenty of people with only one name.

Normally, that's a good idea. But based on OP's description this is a prototype or exersice in building /delivering an mvp. I don't feel that full unicode support is usually part of an mvp.

I agree, but I also think it's a shame, because we should have libraries that make Unicode easy at this point.

Requisite pointer to "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438472 from 12 years ago; use HN search if you want to see the more recent threads).

If you've ever seen "FNU" as an Uber driver's name, that's a consequence of the _US gov't_ enforcing rules like this; it stands for "First Name Unknown".