Apostrophies in name and the internet!

[MOB]

There is an apostrophe in my name. For almost all online data, I simply omit it; There is a relatively common quirk in websites where the apostrophe gets automaticall replaced by a forward slash. This is not so bad, but each time you return to a site, a further forward slash gets added, so you end up receiving goods (or airline tickets for all I know - though I almost never fly ) addressed to 'john o//////////////toole' and such like. I know nothing about programming, but I do wonder what sort of systemic quirk causes this - I have seen it on more than one site.

 

[Carpenter]

It's a bit off topic but the thing that drives me mad is when Internet sites require a postcode when you are registering - I was trying to sign up for Flikr a while back and the site wouldn't accept 'n/a'; 'na' etc

I generally re-enter the county name in capitals and this always works for me.

 

[RainyDay]

It infuriates me that certain company websites don't allow users with apostrophies in their names to enter the name correctly! Just signed up for a Halifax credit card and the online application would not accept the apostrophe in my surname. So, assuming I'm approved, do I end up with a credit card that reflects my name incorrectly because I had to enter it without my beloved apostrophe!?

Have you told Halifax? I guess that might be the first step in getting it sorted.

 

[so-crates]

Not terribly, I'm afraid - haven't had the issue but then I have no apostrophe for it to be a problem with. I think though that car is on the right track. It is something of a throwback to older systems, apostrophe isn't the only awkward one, commas may also present issues depending on how the data is treated by the processing it behind the scenes. These types of symbols were traditionally used to denote the end of a value so older languages in particular have difficulty when they encounter them and not all new code is particularly well set up to deal with them either! Computers are very very dumb - they process information exactly as they are told to and if they encounter something a little different they can do some very odd things. No comfort really - sorry.

 

[legend99]

There may be valid reasons for not allowing apostrophes. I work with databases and have seen apostrophies cause issues around such areas as data matching, transformation rules and XML incompatibilities.
You'll see these data standards applied more in healthcare and finance systems than anywhere else.

In fairness...its a pretty simple problem to get round in any DB application!

 

[Lauren]

Thank you legend! My thoughts exactly....And for databases in Ireland in particular...there must be very few O'Neill, O'Rourke, O'Byrne, O'Connell database designers!

 

[ashambles]

Possibly might try an O-fada, as this really is what the O' is trying to emulate. (Not so easy to insert this on a normal Irish keyboard - on Windows I used charmap and then pasted the character).

So instead of Willy O'Dea you'd have the slightly less anglicized Willy Ó Dea.

 

[Lauren]

Systems can't deal with the apostrophe....Might collapse completely trying to deal with a fada!

 

[Marion]

Ashamlbes: if you hold down Alt Gr and the relevant vowel (with or without the Shift key) you will easily type the fadas.

áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚ

Marion

 

[PMU]

Systems can't deal with the apostrophe....Might collapse completely trying to deal with a fada!

[FONT=&quot]Is nobody on this thread capable of configuring the character set on his or her computer? Have you never heard of ISO 8859-1 or ISO 10646? Or are you all still playing around with 7 bit jobs or doing proprietary encoding? There should not be any problem with letters with diacritic marks for either data processing or interoperability. An immense amount of work has gone into this in the standards area, so just follow international standards, and you should have no problems (or your problems should be significantly reduced).[/FONT]