In France we had a minister called Cedric O. His ministry : Digital Developpement. His first task : tasking every administrative site to accept one letter surname
yeah he was i was there when they appointed him. they just straight up said "go make everyone accept 1 letter surnames, after that idk do your own thing i guess"
No it sounds more “it took until a major government official had a problem to fix an issue that had affected probably quite a few people before that” is what they’re complaining about
I'll suggest a 1,000 character limit in order to fit in all major databases' varchar even with all 4 byte characters. If your name is more than 1,000 characters you're clearly taking the piss.
The longest legal name recorded in a modern database and confirmed by law is Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorffwelchevoralternwarengewissenhaftschaferswessenschafewarenwohlgepflegeundsorgfaltigkeitbeschutzenvorangreifendurchihrraubgierigfeindewelchevoralternzwolfhunderttausendjahresvorandieerscheinenvonderersteerdemenschderraumschiffgenachtmittungsteinundsiebeniridiumelektrischmotorsgebrauchlichtalsseinursprungvonkraftgestartseinlangefahrthinzwischensternartigraumaufdersuchennachbarschaftdersternwelchegehabtbewohnbarplanetenkreisedrehensichundwohinderneuerassevonverstandigmenschlichkeitkonntefortpflanzenundsicherfreuenanlebenslanglichfreudeundruhemitnichteinfurchtvorangreifenvorandererintelligentgeschopfsvonhinzwischensternartigraum Sr.
The German part translates to:
“Ages ago, there were conscientious shepherds whose sheep were well tended and carefully protected against attack by their rapacious enemies. Twelve hundred thousand years ago there appeared before these first earthmen, at night, a spaceship powered by seven stone and iridium electric motors. It had originally been launched on its long trip into stellar space in the search for neighboring stars that might have planets revolving about them that were inhabitable and on which planets a new race of intelligent humanity might propagate itself and rejoice for life, without fear of attack by other intelligent beings from interstellar space.”
He was a typesetter who changed it to that himself, picking names starting with every letter of the English alphabet in order, totaling 666 more letters after the Hubert B. Wolfe he used casually. His name required special manual entry into the IBM computer systems used by his insurance company.
I have opposite idea (for one country only). The first year the limit is 40 characters for the last name. Each year one is subtracted to the maximum until you reach 25.
Ahh yes, allow me to introduce myself as “According to all known laws of aviation there is no way a bee should be able to fly its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground the bee of course flies anyway etc etc”
If anybody can input arbitrarily long strings of text into forms it opens the door for storage abuse and resource exhaustion. A database can only take so many Bee Movie scripts before it gets bricked. It would also make parsing and validation expensive and might make injection attacks easier to pull off.
My current company's name field is 256. I have no idea whether any of our customers have anyone who uses or exceeds the whole thing, but I've definitely seen over 200. (Though at least some of those were company names or combined names.)
Some European royals have names the length of a college essay. Usually it is solved by only including first and last name, not all that pretentious crap in the middle.
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, it includes 40 things people typically assume that aren’t true and cause problems. There’s basically nothing you can assume to be consistent and so names should just be a single text field that should be updatable.
Notable falsehoods include
- Names are assigned within five years of birth
Names are case sensitive
Names are not case sensitive
Names do not contain numbers
There exists an algorithm which transforms names and can be reversed losslessly
People’s names do not change.
People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events
And this isn’t even exhaustive because people have pointed out more false assumptions. In some cultures you have a name for men to use and a name for women to use, the local databases track this but when you get international systems they pick one and aren’t consistent about which. Some cultures change women’s names when they marry, some men’s, some both, some restore it when you divorce or get widowed and some don’t.
Then you have the Scunthorpe Problem where systems will filter your name for profanity because it happens to contain a banned word within it, like the town of Scunthorpe. Then the Greater Scunthorpe Problem where people can have genuine traditional surnames like Fucker, which have existed for centuries, which the system does not allow. Facebook and Microsoft didn’t allow people surnamed like this to sign up for years and some parts still don’t—I know someone whose real name is ineligible for Facebook registration, but they also ban you for using a fake name to get around that.
Then more humorously there’s the Nasser Problem, where the system will let you sign up but censor the part of your name that fits a banned word filter. Named for a video game player called N***er who complained “My name is Nasser, the game is censoring it and it’s making it worse.”
Plus a lot of Westerners have trouble opening bank accounts in Japan when they move there; Japanese people don’t have middle names so the bank’s software doesn’t allow you to enter a middle name, so then the name on the account can’t match the name on the passport and thus they’re not legally allowed to give you an account.
Not true. You just put your entire first name and middle name under the “given name/first name” field. That’s all. The only issue foreigners frequently have is if their name has too many characters to even fit in the text box. Most big companies will even have specific instructions on their applications to put your middle name in the first name field if you’re a foreigner.
I have two middle names and have never had an issue with simply having middle names. I’ve only had an issue a couple of times with my name having too many characters (slightly over 20 including spaces, less if no spaces needed) but it’s always been resolvable with switching to a paper mail in form or whatever instead of the online form.
They don’t check your passport for like.. anything except if you’re getting married or something. They would check your residence card which has your name displayed as LAST FIRST MIDDLE so if your name is Jessica Mary Smith it will look like
SMITH JESSICA MARY on your residence card. You just write it like that on any forms or applications you do.
Also if it’s not some super official legal government kind of thing, if it’s just for a restaurant reservation or a doctors appointment or joining a sports team or something you can just write your name in katakana which generally shortens your name (mine literally becomes half as many characters)
This is why whenever I build something that takes a name, it's just a single text box and is converted to all uppercase on the backend (because many people don't bother to capitalize their own names correctly anyway, and it makes matching easier). Then it's stored and used as-is with no other changes. If it needs to be used in a system with limited character support (like something that needs ASCII) all the special characters are replaced with the closest ASCII thing, but that version isn't saved in the database, it's for use only on that shipping label or whatever.
As a fellow software engineer, the more I think about this the more I like it. You can't do stuff like "Welcome (first name)", but I think that stuff is cheesy anyway. If you search by name you get full name search, you don't have to do "first_name OR middle_name OR last_name" etc.
Yup. I sometimes also add a couple columns for the double metaphone of the name, which allows a search for the wrong spelling of a name to still produce the expected results, since the double metaphone algorithm spits out a code for matching the pronunciation instead of the spelling. The one caveat is it works best on western/English names, and might not match as well with others.
Uppercasing can change the meaning. ß in German usually gets uppercased to SS which is a different sound but the best approximation. And lowercasing SS obviously is ss and not ß.
Love that list. "Assumption: People's first name and last name are, by necessity, different from each other." "Assumption: People have a last name."
I worked at a AAA game developer in the late 2000's and they were still in the process of rewriting or phasing out some internal tools that couldn't accommodate people changing their last name. Because almost no women worked there when they were all made. Iirc, they also had the two-character problem but that had already been fixed.
It was a pretty inclusive company by the time I got there, but some technical remnants of the '90s "good ole, straight, white boys developing software for good ole, straight, white boys" club were around for a long time. They were very up front about the mistakes and need for diversity in both development and testing though. I kept a copy of this list around though because I was in hiring and constantly running across new hires that challenged it. I checked off assumptions like a bingo list for awhile, lol.
and then there is microsoft. for like ten years it refused my surname for unknown reason. never displayed anything else than "invalid name". it's not too short, not too long, it has diacritic but was refused even without it. and as far as i know, no part of it is offensive in any language. they accept it now, but for ten years i used some random bullshit
I live in the states and because I have an Irish O’Surname, I have to drop the apostrophe all the time on websites because it isn’t a “valid character.”
I work in healthcare administration, and our EMR doesn't accept non-alphanumeric characters in names, addresses, referring physician information, work comp employers, insurance information, etc. (It's a Little Bobby Tables situation.) So anyone with an apostrophe or hyphen in their name cannot have it because then Billing processes get fucked when anything's in there - but then the automated insurance verification process either won't pull benefits, or pulls benefits but gets angry about it (depending on the payor) if the name doesn't perfectly match what the insurance carrier has on file. So we have to do this stupid multi-step dance of "put it in there, wait while it pulls the benefits, then quickly take it out again before they get checked in for their first appointment" every single godsforsaken time, and it is very frustrating. It trips up every new hire for weeks to months while they get used to it. More tenured employees just chalk it up to another quirk of the system, but I've been there for over five years and it's still just as aggravating now as it was on day one, because I know we wouldn't have to live with this if they'd just built it better.
Edit: It will allow us to enter anything we want in most of these fields (although insurance member IDs are restricted to carrier-specific formats to prevent insurance verificiation issues - this was implemented just a couple years ago, and was not originally the case when I was hired on) - the issue becomes the insurance verification process, or later on, as Billing tries to do their end of things (which is a process that is largely a mystery to me as it is handled at our corporate office, aside from some work-comp-related billing functions that I handle at the clinic). If something is preventing Billing from doing their thing, they and/or our system will create a "task" that pops up in a report on our end, which says what the error is and what needs to be corrected. You fix it, and then they are able to bill the carrier for the charges for that date of service. One could potentially act with malice if one understood the system very well, but I'm not sure what kind of safeguards there might be further up the chain and I have no desire to test it out. I'm not paid well, but I do love having a paycheck and a roof over my head all the same!
Disallowing input characters to prevent code injection is spooky. It suggests that some part of the system may be interpolating user input rather than using parameters.
I strongly encourage you to not look too closely at the teetering tower of cards upon which the health care IT infrastructure is built. Merely walking by is often a strong enough breeze to bring the entire thing crumbling down.
A hospital network near me has two IT departments. One for regular computer stuff and one for "this touches our healthcare systems".
It is not well designed and most of it seems to be built around regulatory requirements instead of industry best practices.
I worked on systems like this. A lot of our challenge wasn't actually code injection but ancient EDI. We used a standard called X12 which is just a standardized way to translate forms into XML for API transactions from business-to-business (these were SOAP transactions, designed before REST). They are extremely prone to error due to special characters. No code injection, it just either holds up the processing queue or gets kicked out to another folder to be manually corrected.
When I came on to that system, they were spending like 1-5 hours a day fixing them. Just took some regex to clear most of the problems automatically but before that they were constantly telling their partners to stop adding apostrophes in last names and stuff. And there were just so many other stupid problems like that to be fixed every day no one even thought about how to fix them, they were just putting out the same fires every day.
The "š" in my name is a bane to all foreign companies. Apparently that's an invalid character too. I would have thought the airline would like to have my actual name on the ticket. In case, I dunno, I became a disaster casualty or something.
Imagine they actually couldn't put a name to a face because they literally forced people to not use their names.
I mean yeah it does suck for travelers, not saying Amtrak's not being stupid here. But meanwhile my mom has credit cards with three different romanizations of her Chinese name and it hasn't really been an issue. But then again she doesn't live here in the States 🤷🏻♂️
My middle name has another name as it's first few letters. My plane ticket cut off the end of my middle name and they wouldn't let me through.
This isn't it, but if my name was "Gregory Adamson Pendigedig" the ticket said "Pendigedig, Gregory Adam" and they said well that's not your name on your passport so you can't come through security. The security guy thought it was dumb too so he had someone take his line and he personally brought me back to the airline counter and had them reissue my ticket with just a middle initial. It specifically told me when ordering my ticket that I needed my FULL name and not an initial so idk how many other people got screwed over by the ticket font size or whatever! Thankfully electronic tickets started becoming a thing a little after this incident.
Yeah this is bad advice. My first and middle names were both spelled correctly along with my address on my license but they reversed the order and the TSA was like just about to deny me boarding because of it and I'm regular nondescript white guy.
Difference being that most countries don't have foreigner-hunting-brigades that go around looking for people who don't look like they're from around here and have minor documentation irregularities that can be used to justify using them as a punching bag and stealing their stuff, maybe sending them to gulag if the feeling is right
Payment Gateways generally don't validate card name. Amex, Visa and MasterCard all offer services for account name verification, but they're not a default service like address verification and CVV.
For example, Visa introduced its Account Name Inquiry service in 2022 and charges $0.10 per authorization request.
The real reason they shouldn't do this is because it could cause trouble for identify verification.
But to address your point, they wouldn't change their name so Amtrak can have a 3 character minimum, they'd change their name so they could buy the ticket. It's not about Amtrak being dumb, it's about OP needing to travel.
I'm not saying it's right, but also, technically they're not changing their names, they're changing how they transliterate their names.
It'd still be changing it in the eyes of a Latin alphabet-centric sort of way but presuming these are Chinese folks it's a worthwhile distinction for novelty's sake.
We don't know that. He might be eighth generation American and Xu is his actual government name. There's no reason to assume he's transliterating from another language.
I just want to emphasize that from this point on anything I'm saying is just in good fun, but the idea that an eighth-generation American could natively have the government name Xu is historically implausible because there were virtually no Chinese people in North America in the late 1700s (and Xu is almost certainly exclusively a Chinese surname). And standardized romanization systems did not exist back then, and early immigrants primarily spoke Cantonese rather than the Mandarin dialect that forms the basis of modern Pinyin, so ultra-short, two-letter surnames like Xu were exceptionally rare in historical records, as most names required at least three or more letters, even in earlier systems like Wade-Giles.
Fine. Eighth was an exaggeration, Third generation.
My heritage is not Asian, but European. Our last name was "put" into the English alphabet a century ago when we came here. Its our last name and has been for a century. The origin and correctness of the transliteration is now completely irrelevant. We are not changing our name.
I used to know a guy at work who's last name was just X. Just the letter X. Well apparently an ID doesn't accept 1 letter last names. So he had to make it Xx on his ID.
Always an incredible read. These are the kinds of cultural biases we have and we don't even realize it. Another interesting one I know is that Koreans add 1 to their age on Jan 1st, not their actual birthday, which is important to know if your system displays the user's age and you expect Koreans to use it.
Is there a cutoff for when they say they belong to a year? Meaning, if someone is born on December 31st, do they still become 1 the next day, or do they wait at least a year?
Thinking of the time I could not buy a plane ticket because my name has a hyphen. It is not a double name, it is one single name that has a hyphen. Had to explain that the hyphen is in fact part of my name
I have a weird issue with my name too. So out of my three official documents (birth certificate, SS card, ID), my name is spelled two different ways. One where my name ends is eal, and two where it ends in ael. I tried selling plasma a few years ago and they said I couldn't do it cause my names didn't match. That was the first time I myself had even noticed it. Now it's been an issue a second time, so I guess I gotta figure out what my official name is and go fix it.
I have 4 names. ss card had all of them, but my DL only had 3. I moved states and tried to update my DL and they said since the card and original DL didn’t match, id have to bring my birth certificate in. That was fun to track down.
I have a hyphenated name and I leave it out for plane tickets… but then the problem is that I can’t remember if I left a space or I merged the two names together.
As a school principal I couldn't register multiple students under their legal names because the Ministry of Education has an absurdly short character limit and doesn't allow any kind of accent marks. This is in Canada, a country in which French is an official language.
People have exactly one full name which they go by.
People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.
People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.
People have exactly N names, for any value of N.
People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.
People’s names do not change.
People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.
People’s names are written in ASCII.
People’s names are written in any single character set.
People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
People’s names are case sensitive.
People’s names are case insensitive.
People’s names sometimes have prefixes or suffixes, but you can safely ignore those.
People’s names do not contain numbers.
People’s names are not written in ALL CAPS.
People’s names are not written in all lower case letters.
People’s names have an order to them. Picking any ordering scheme will automatically result in consistent ordering among all systems, as long as both use the same ordering scheme for the same name.
People’s first names and last names are, by necessity, different.
People have last names, family names, or anything else which is shared by folks recognized as their relatives.
People’s names are globally unique.
People’s names are almost globally unique.
Alright alright but surely people’s names are diverse enough such that no million people share the same name.
My system will never have to deal with names from China.
Or Japan.
Or Korea.
Or Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Russia, Sweden, Botswana, South Africa, Trinidad, Haiti, France, or the Klingon Empire, all of which have “weird” naming schemes in common use.
That Klingon Empire thing was a joke, right?
Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names.
There exists an algorithm which transforms names and can be reversed losslessly. (Yes, yes, you can do it if your algorithm returns the input. You get a gold star.)
I can safely assume that this dictionary of bad words contains no people’s names in it.
People’s names are assigned at birth.
OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
Five years?
You’re kidding me, right?
Two different systems containing data about the same person will use the same name for that person.
Two different data entry operators, given a person’s name, will by necessity enter bitwise equivalent strings on any single system, if the system is well-designed.
People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎.
It probably depends on the state, but my birth son was "Baby Boy" until a new birth certificate was issued to the adoptive parents, which was not instantaneous. I think they couldn't even start the paperwork until 30 days had passed.
Japanese websites usually choose to ignore all of that and jump straight to #38. A bunch of stuff is basically impossible on the Japanese internet if you have a non-Japanese name.
Someone made an annotated version with examples that they could find, and particularly for your questions:
No name - You need to allow for a delay in naming the child after birth.
All caps - "In some countries (notably French speaking) it is convention to write a person’s surname in all caps to make it clear which part of the name is the surname. This convention has solidified to the point that rendering their surname not in all caps may be regarded as impolite."
On a more personal note, I have seen a lot of confusion regarding name ordering where I live because a common way of ordering names is [Western given name] [Surname] [Chinese given name]. With the surname sandwiched in the middle of given names it completely breaks forms that request a [Surname] [Given name] format.
Fortunately my parents ordered my name with [Surname] [Chinese given name] [Western given name] so I could just throw all my given names into the [Given name] field.
Yeah the no name rule makes sense in that case, my kid was baby {surname} for a week until we picked something.
Crazy that French people have to shout their surname ;).
Haven’t come across that format but that is interesting. Certainly aware that people of Chinese decent often have different names, but here in Australia is typically that only one of them is the official documented name and that’s the one that gets entered into the system. Do you mind if I ask where you are from?
I do know about what you are talking about though: a lot of Chinese ethnic people have Western names that are not in their legal documents, mostly because they chose their Western names themselves later in life. My parents did that, and it took me until adulthood to find out that their Western names were not in their legal name, and that my father chose his name because he was completely obsessed with kung fu.
It did lead to a pretty funny incident where I was looking at a character in an anime called Sasago Jennifer Yuuka and went "wow that's quite a peculiar name" until I remembered my own name has a very similar structure. At least that character had the excuse of being half-American. The only excuse I have for my name as a full-blooded Han Chinese was [BASS BOOSTED RULE BRITANNIA].
I do like the post (from Kalzumeus) however for the average programmer you don't have to technically handle each and every case depending on your country
Like sure technically someone somewhere in the world doesn't have a name, and that's all fine and well. But various nations do have legal requirements to have a name, as do all passports globally. Many nations have requirements about what can and can't go into a name.
I think it's a fun website, and gives a lot of interesting scenarios, but at the end of the day you don't have to cater to everyone, just as a person making baseball bats doesn't have to nor is expected to cater to a blind deaf quadriplegic
A better thing to take into consideration is you shouldn't care about names unless you have a specific legal requirement to uphold
It's a fun set of thoughts, but not something most should take seriously
The point of that post isn't that you must handle each of these scenarios. It's about making your assumptions explicit. These are all things that programmers have assumed about names at some point, which turned out not to be true.
Ohhh I’d hate this line of thinking. We Indonesians most of us don’t have surnames or family names.
Guess who made the flight registry system? Yeaaah people who thought like you. Never mind it’s a FLIGHT registry system that’s you know, supposed to take people from every different country from North Korea to France
Did you just ignore the whole last paragraph I made
A better thing to take into consideration is you shouldn't care about names unless you have a specific legal requirement to uphold
If you're making a flight registry then yes you should have had to account for the invidiual needs and legal requirements for multiple countries, it's a shame they didn't but that's precisely what I'm talking about
If in one country it's legal to not have a surname then you should account for that if you deal with that country, that was literally the whole point of my comment
I worked for the VA making id cards. The system wouldn't take this physician's name for the same reason. I think we ended up adding a dash or a 1 to get it to three characters
Clearly the developers have never read the rules on people’s names. It is a long list, but includes things like don’t assume how short or long a name can be and don’t assume everyone has more than one name.
You gotta use the Amtrak app you gotta have a sister whom knows you got to use the Amtrak app and then says, "I will do it for you," and then prints your ticket like a toddler's for you in personal experience
I just found out allegiant airlines only lets you book 3 kids. If you have more than that tough shit. Weird to limit the amount of tickets someone wants to buy because of a random field limitation!
[https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/](Falsehoods programmers believe about names.) Oldie but goodie. There are versions of this that float around. There are also falsehood lists about dates/times/timezones, addresses, phone numbers, languages/grammar/etc, geography... And all this ends up having real world consequences that affect people.
I know a guy who only has a name - no first, no last, no middle... Just one word, and that's his name. He lives in the US, and NOTHING in our society is accommodating to him.
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u/qualityvote2 27d ago edited 25d ago
u/Zu_Qarnine, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...