Does anybody here have a name with an apostrophe that many web pages won’t accept in their input fields?
I don’t have any apostrophe in my my real name. But I use the name O’Riley as an alias when I’m filling out web pages that I know are going to lead to being bombarded with spam. But a lot of the bull crap pages won’t accept O’Riley as a valid value because of the apostrophe.
Does that infuriate anyone who really has an apostrophe in their name?
Just curious.
I have a period in my last name and very few computers, including the DMV, can handle it, so I get some very odd pronunciations of my name.
I have a hyphenated first name. Many websites won’t accept it so I’m forced to use one-half my name or, when possible, indicate a first and middle name. Even websites that seem to handle it often ignore the hyphen and run it together.
I have a space in my last name. I don’t usually use it ever when online, but I would say 90% of standardized tests and things like that with bubble fields that I took in High School didn’t accomodate that, so I was never sure on the ones that did whether or not to put a space in it, to keep it the same as the other ones.
I’m in college now, and my name has a space in it as I’m registered, but my ID card deosn’t, and somehow they won’t let my brother fix his so it has a space.
Should I make a big stinking media row to complain about how people with “non-standard” names are being discriminated against? 
My last name is O’Neill and I’ve had difficulty here and there, but on the whole a lot of different fields are smart enough to understand the apostrophe. The most common variation I see is “O/Neill”, but that’s only showed up a total of about 5 times through the years.
I’ve also had to deal with the issue of standardized tests. Usually the forms tell you what to do in case of a hyphen or apostrophe, but most of the time I end up just omitting it and entering my name as “ONeill”
It’s a database (SQL) thing. The problem is that somewhere in the depths of the website’s programming it converts the form to insert the record in the database of members.
The language needed to interact with the database looks something like this:
INSERT INTO members (Name) VALUES(‘Tom O’Reily’);
See how the values section is apostrophe delimited? If you tried to insert that, the system wouldn’t know what the Reily part was and crash out. The programmer who set it up realized this (after getting back complaints from users) and he undoubtedly took the easy way out by changing apostrophes into another character instead of looking at a way to include them safely.
It’s poor programming. There’s many ways to do this better, and if apostrophes don’t work on a website then chances are there are some major security holes the programmer completely missed. (e.g. A single user registering with a name of “);DROP TABLE MEMBERS;” could erase all the user names.)
If you like the site, you can do the site administrator a big favor by e-mailing him and say that a programmer friend of yours recommended looking into placeholders as a better way to do SQL transactions.
He might like this link:
(laughing) That was certainly garbled. Let me translate myself to English:
The websites that have problems with your name are falling into a common programming trap. The problem is that there are certain characters which mess up databases. Apostrophes are certainly the most common criminal. The programmer of the site realized that there was a problem with apostrophes and either inserted code to change them into an innoculous character, or omitted them completely.
If you like the site, you should email them, tell them your problem, and say that a programmer friend recommended looking into this page on “placeholders”:
This is not because the programmer was trying to avoid database problems, it’s because the programmer was an idiot of simply didn’t think of handling it. It can always be handled properly.
One time teaching Software Engineering, the term project was to do a parking permit system. I could not believe how naive all the students were. They assumed that all license plates were from our state and in 3 letter-3 digit format. I went round and round with their specifications. Each time pointing out how they still were missing something. “What if they’re from another state?” “What if they have personalized license plates?” “What if the state replaces the plates (again) and goes to 3 digit-3 letter?” (Which they did.) What about specialty college plates where there’s a college logo and then 4 digits?" (So the same 4 digits appear on a lot of plates.) I just couldn’t get them to think “big” about just this one issue, let alone all the others.
A trick to fix this (on the programming side) is to replace all “’” with “’’” (the full line in ASP is Replace(txtLName, “’”,"’’"), and most languages have a string replace function). If it is a database issue, you can try manually inserting the two single quotes (in other words, type O’'Neill).
And bluetrust, the DROP TABLE MEMBERS wouldn’t work unless not only was the programmer careless, but the DBA careless as well. Giving a casual user delete access isn’t that common.