• I have an apostrophe and it’s super annoying as some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.

    So I’ve received ID with Mc%20dole or they add a space in it. Or I’ll get a work email with an apostrophe but I cant use it anywhere because sites have it disabled. And I’ve missed my flight because I changed my ticket once to add the apostrophe and the system just broke at the gate.

    Worse yet many flight companies have “you will not be able to board if your ID doesn’t exactly reflect your details” but their form doesn’t allow it. Even most forms for card payments don’t allow it even though it’s the name on my card.

    • agilob ( agilob@programming.dev ) 
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      2 years ago

      I have an apostrophe and it’s super annoying as some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.

      My surname contains a character that’s only present in the Polish alphabet. Writing my full name as is broke lots of systems, encoding, printed paperwork and even British naturalisation application on Home Office website. My surname was part of my username back at uni, and everytime I tried to login on Windows, it would crash underlying LDAP server, logging everyone in the classroom out and forcing ICT to restart the server.

    • rekabis ( rekabis@lemmy.ca ) 
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      2 years ago

      I have an apostrophe

      Scottish/Irish?

      some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.

      Which kind of apostrophe?

      A straight apostrophe, fine - that can and does get used in valid SQL injection attacks. I would be disgusted at any input form that didn’t sanitize that.

      But a curly apostrophe? Nothing should be filtering a curly apostrophe, as it has no function or use within SQL. So if you learn how to bring that up in alt codes (Windows, specifically), Key combos (Mac) or dead keys (Linux), as well as direct Unicode codes for most any Win/Mac/*Nix platform, you should be golden.

      Unless the developer of that input form was a complete moron and made extra-tight validation.

      Plus, knowing the inputs for a lot of extended UTF-8 characters not found on a normal keyboard is also a wee bit of a typing superpower.

  • lime! ( lime@feddit.nu ) 
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    2 years ago

    asking questions like this is how i found out that one of the allowed characters in names in my country is ÿ, which is fine in Latin-1 but in 7-bit ASCII is DEL.

  • There are a frightening number of systems that don’t allow “-”, which isn’t even an edge case. A lot of people - mostly women - hyphenate their last names on marriage, rather than throw their old name away. My wife did. She legally changed her name when she came of age, and when we met and married years later she said, “I paid for money for my name; I’m not letting it go.” (Note: I wasn’t pressuring her to take my name.) So she hyphenated it, and has come to regret the decision. She says she should have switched, or not, but the hyphen causes problems everywhere. It’s not a legal character in a lot of systems, including some government systems.

    • Affidavit ( Affidavit@lemm.ee ) 
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      2 years ago

      It boggles my mind how so many websites and platforms incorrectly say my e-mail address is ‘invalid’ because it has an apostrophe in it.

      No. It is NOT invalid. I have been receiving e-mails for years. You just have a shitty developer.

        • Ephera ( Ephera@lemmy.ml ) 
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          2 years ago

          Well, and remember: If in doubt, send them an e-mail. You probably want to do that anyways to ensure they have access to that mailbox.

          You can try to use a regex as a basic sanity check, so they’ve not accidentally typed a completely different info into there, but the e-mail standard allows so many wild mail addresses, that your basic sanity check might as well be whether they’ve typed an @ into there.

            • Ephera ( Ephera@lemmy.ml ) 
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              Yeah, I’m just saying that the benefit of using such a regex isn’t massive (unless you’re building a service which can’t send a mail).

              a@b is a syntactically correct e-mail address. Most combinations of letters, an @-symbol and more letters will be syntactically correct, which is what most typos will look like. The regex will only catch fringe cases, such as a user accidentally hitting the spacebar.

              And then, personally, I don’t feel like it’s worth pulling in one of those massive regexes (+ possibly a regex library) for most use-cases.

        • lad ( sukhmel@programming.dev ) 
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          2 years ago

          There are many regexes that validate email, and they usually aren’t compliant with the RFC, there are some details in the very old answer on SO. So, better not validate and just send a confirmation, than restrict and lock people out, imo

          • rumba ( rumba@lemmy.zip ) 
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            2 years ago

            The article you just mentioned in the comments includes both a completely reasonable and viable regex and binary and library alternatives that are in most languages.

            • lad ( sukhmel@programming.dev ) 
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              2 years ago

              Reasonable and viable ≠ RFC compliant

              This quote summarises my views:

              There is some danger that common usage and widespread sloppy coding will establish a de facto standard for e-mail addresses that is more restrictive than the recorded formal standard.

    • troybot [he/him] ( troybot@midwest.social ) 
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      And you’d think a simple solution is just leave out the hyphen when you put you name in, but that can also lead to problems when the system is looking for a 100% perfect match.

      And good luck if they need to scan the barcode on your ID.

    • dditty ( dditty@lemm.ee ) 
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      There are also fringe externalities from this too. I have my mom’s last name for my middle name and my dad’s for my last name. But back in the 90s, my state would erroneously handle that scenario as having no middle name and both names hyphenated for a last name. I didn’t find this out until I turned 18 and tried to get a retail job and they wouldn’t hire me until it got fixed.

      First I had to go to the Dept of Health and get a new birth certificate, then I had to do the same at the social security administration for a new social security card. Hours and hours over multiple days just so I could earn minimum wage folding and selling used clothing. Ironically, the name mixup never was a problem when I did taxes previously.

  • rekabis ( rekabis@lemmy.ca ) 
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    2 years ago

    A line break is a non-printable character. So it would only work in the scope of electronic storage. The minute it hits other media, the line break character is subject to how that media handles it’s presence, and then it is lost permanently from that step forward.

    Plus, many input forms make use of validation that will just trim anything that isn’t a character or number, removing the line break character.

    • Excrubulent ( Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ) 
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      As someone with a very mildly unusual name, I can tell you that it doesn’t matter whether a system could or could not meaningfully represent the name. Often the people or systems just refuse to acknowledge any deviation from what’s expected. Sometimes databases are written to enforce arbitrary grammatical rules that make my name impossible to write, or the people using the systems will just “correct” the “error” without telling me. I don’t mind that much but our normative systems just love to homogenise us.

        • Excrubulent ( Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ) 
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          No they’re not. They’re required for us to be catalogued and managed by a state, to our detriment and the enrichment of the ruling class.

          “Normality” is a fucking scam that keeps your imagination in check, so you never look outside your assigned box and realise you don’t have to belong to anyone.

          You have no idea how much genocidal violence has been done to condition our society to accept a dystopic phrase like “normal names are required for the functioning of society”.

          Your mind has been caged.

  • ano_ba_to ( ano_ba_to@sopuli.xyz ) 
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    It’s impossible to represent that on paper. It could be misrepresented as a specific number of spaces. Depending on the position on the paper, it may also be hard to tell if the carriage return comes with the line feed. Unless you want the document to be in ASCII or EBCDIC hex, it’s like writing an ambiguous math problem where the answer is different depending on how you were taught about the order of operations. Don’t do this to your kid, Abcde.