More things I'm begging people to do, this time with no apologies:

[conuly]

If you have any influence or control at all over the people who run a database with people's names, please please please do whatever you can to make sure they accept hyphens and apostrophes. This is 2022! You don't need to be so stingy with what are, in fact, pretty common aspects of a lot of people's names!

My sister should not have spent half this day arguing with the hospital over whether or not the name Anne-Marie properly contains a fucking hyphen.

Comments

[frandroid]

This wasn't acceptable even in 1986...

My partner has a middle name. We recently flew with Delta and her name appeared as Firstnamemiddlename Lastname on her boarding pass. I was a bit stunned... This is not a minor company.

[calimac]

They're not the only airline that does that. Also there's truncation of the name after an arbitrary number of letters.

[mtbc]

Absolutely, I routinely have both effects on my boarding passes. Fortunately it still seems to match my passport sufficiently!

[pauamma]

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

[hilarita]

This has not been a problem any company should have for well over a decade.

[readerjane]

My databases do. (hug)

The apostrophes can be a hassle, because so many platforms read them as an open-quote, then cough up a hairball when they can’t find a corresponding close-quote.

But there are a lot of O’Brians out there, as well as plenty of other names I’m not so familiar with, that include non-alphabetic characters. So we find workarounds.

[conuly]

The apostrophes can be a hassle, because so many platforms read them as an open-quote, then cough up a hairball when they can’t find a corresponding close-quote.

I recommend that anybody in the market for a platform to handle a new database carefully avoid anything that can't handle fucking apostrophes in names without screaming in agony.

[calimac]

I've found when sorting alphabetically lists of names in Excel, it knows to ignore the apostrophe in names like O'Brien, O'Neill, et al, in alphabetizing. Good job.

[pauamma]

Unless I misunderstand what you wrote, any site with a platform doing that is a SQL injection waiting to happen.

Obligatory xkcd

[conuly]

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Little_Bobby_Tables

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/327:_Exploits_of_a_Mom

Re: Obligatory xkcd

[elf]

Bobby Tables grew up and got himself a car...

Re: Obligatory xkcd

[pauamma]

Reminded by some comments of that story about traffic tickets being issued all over Ireland, apparently to the same Polish driver. When Irish law enforcement highers-up asked the Poland embassy for help tracking that repeat offender, the answer was along the lines of: ... that says "driving license".

[frandroid]

Since we nowadays have distinct characters for apostrophes (I think there are three, actually?) in addition to the single quote character, a good ingestion of a user's name could take any single quotes or apostrophes and rewrite them all as a chosen apostrophe character, avoiding this issue entirely. Not that I have done that myself; usually ORMs are sufficient to avoid this issue... But I feel it would be good to fix that in the data, since no real name contains actual quote marks, Patrick McKenzie be damned.

[the_siobhan]

It's been an issue for a while here that some provinces won't register indigenous names because they contain special characters.

[redbird]

One of my partners seriously considered changing his name when he got married in 2001, because he was tired of dealing with databases that couldn't handle a surname with an apostrophe.

Some of those databases were Irish, including businesses and I think some official paperwork/institutions.

[mtbc]

It's absolutely ridiculous she had to spend so much effort on such a simple and, frankly, common thing, at such a difficult time. If anybody has enough will someday later, it's worth a note to the management about this. I'm sorry that this happened.

My wife currently has the awkwardness of being named (genericized (-:) P Q R S which her passport clearly says has P Q as first name and R as middle name. No hyphen so everybody in Britain seems to assume it's P first name, Q R middle names, despite efforts to explain otherwise.

In Boston I had the job of working on a webapp that handled hospital patient databases that could handle French and German customers and such, we had all this stuff solved at least a decade ago. There's really no excuse.

[ethelmay]

I started using my birth surname as a middle name when I got married, which is hardly an uncommon occurrence, but I kept my original middle name, when apparently they expect you to use one or the other. The IRS got peeved with me for using the wrong middle initial, and I had to go back to the SocSec folks and have them put my original given names both in the first-name field, and my birth surname by itself in the middle-name field. I then got issued a new SocSec card with the same four names in the same order. Using a convenient obviously-not-mine name, imagine Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder wanting to go by Laura I. Wilder, not Laura E. Wilder, but to keep all four names on her record.

(I did of course seriously consider not changing my name at all, and in retrospect sometimes wish I hadn't, but it has been very convenient to have one family name.)

[dine]

it's infuriating!

unfortunately, ACME's database apparently cannot handle hyphens. and we serve *lots* of people with double-barreled last names. it's a big commercial DB in the field, and I've no idea just what the programming problem is, we were just warned years ago not to include hyphens. so we're supposed to enter last names separately (I do usually include hyphens in first names, and so far things have not blown up). and I include the apostrophes, as we also serve a population which tends to use those lots

[sixbeforelunch]

I have an apostrophe in my last name, and always have to spell my name twice for people because some computer systems take it and some don't, so I totally understand the frustration. It's extra awful when you're dealing with grief, though. I'm sorry. :(

[senmut]

Our search function for pulling up results? CAN'T even HANDLE spaces in last names. I have to try the first half ONLY to search.

And because of the issue YOU just noted, not all offices put the double name in properly, and sometimes the first half gets put in as a MIDDLE name.

(I'm pretty fond of 'tell me the date of birth and WHAT DAY it was sent to us' just to get a narrower field when last name is breaking the system because the system is stupid)

[conuly]

Eurgh, I completely forgot about spaces, in either first or last names. Foolish oversight - my mother's mail either is addressed to Annemarie or Anne Marie, both of which, as noted, are wrong but one of which has a space.

[the_future_modernes]

Its utterly infuriating that this is still a thing

[conuly]

You said it.

[silveradept]

Ugh, yes. It's very annoying to see on identity documents a space where there's a high percentage chance there would be a hyphen or am apostrophe, and theoretically to have to put in the name as it appears on the document. (Most times I ask, then put it in correctly, because my system, miracle of miracles, can handle those characters perfectly fine.)

[conuly]

For my mother, they finally agreed on a compromise of listing her name wrong and then adding a line "Known as Anne-Marie" afterwards.

This is very stupid, and my sister is very unhappy about it, but we generally agreed that my mother had enough issues with perceived rejection without us stranding her body in the morgue over this.

[hudebnik]

I live in Queens, NY, as do at least a million other people, and most of those people have hyphens in their street addresses: "123-45 Sixth Avenue". It's a logical system, indicating transparently that the address is on Sixth Avenue, about halfway between 123rd and 124th Streets. But a remarkable number of name-and-address databases, including some at USPS and some at major companies headquartered in New York City, choke on a hyphen in the street-number field.

[thekumquat]

Britain has the same problem - I used to work at 3-8 Whitehall Place, which caused no end of problems. I note it's now being called 3 Whitehall Place, which makes sense. But many Scots have problems with their addresses, written 3/12 X Close, as many databases can cope with hyphens or apostrophes but not slashes...