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Comment by dirkdk | Hacker News Reader

I have had a decent number of forms that would not allow me to enter my last name because it contains a space: De Kok. Apparently over the centuries americans coming from Europe would drop spaces. For instance Vanderbilt is a Dutch name, that stems from the original Van der Bilt (means from the Bilt, which is a Dutch city)

So now American programmers assume a space in a last name (or a dash for that matter) never happens so is an illegal condition that should cause validation to fail. I don't agree

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A friend in university had the last name "des Trois Maisons", or "Of the three houses" (if I'm remembering it correctly). I can only imagine the number of computer systems that just die on that. Not one space, but two!

Come to think of it, I bet he reads this comments. Hi [name withheld]!

Seriously, what a great last name.

You might want to edit your comment to avoid giving out your friend's first and last names.

Or at least to provide sensationalistic information about the billions in gold he has stored at his house.

Ehh, valid point. Edited, thanks for pointing it out.

And then there are people who have two last names separated by a space, but which cannot be considered a single last name. Their last name goes <paternal figure's paternal last name> <maternal figure's paternal last name>. Those who keep this naming standard for their children will pass on only their paternal figure's paternal name, which they consider their last name.

A few I know had such issues they had to drop their maternal figure's paternal last name so that they would be called by their paternal figure's paternal last name, which was their preferred name when using only one last name (using both was similar to when someone uses a full middle name calling on a person).

My last name has a space in it as well. All the airlines helpfully remove the space for me, making it not match my passport, leading to me always being flagged by the computer for the 'reject line' at the US border.

My last name does not have a space but probably did at some point in time (DeFelippi). Some idiot at the passport office put a space in it (De Felippi) despite not having a space in the application. Australian customs really hassled me about that.

My wife has to deal with this. Then it causes problems because your airline ticket (or whatever) is supposed to exactly match a valid government ID, but one allows the space and the other doesn't.

I think the situation is like spaces in filenames - difficult to handle in parsing and displaying and even things like equality comparison (are multiple spaces considered the same as one? what about trailing or leading spaces?) turn into a bit of a mess.

Unfortunately, the classic solution of escaping spaces would be unlikely to be easily comprehended by most users.

Dashes seem like accepting them would be easier than spaces, but again you have problems with multiple, leading, and trailing...

Yeah I have a last name like the "Van Der Bilt" example and sometimes people refer to me as Mr. "Van".

Other times, like for booking an airplane ticket it is standard practice to drop the space. Can't book the tickets without that.

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