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Comment by justinv | Hacker News Reader

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justinv·

Hyphens too.

Source: have a hyphenated last name. "No special characters in this field".

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I'll bet it was an airline. The underlying field type for names in a PNR in the TPF os only allows A-Z and space.

I get that with periods in a street name. Like when I write "123 Main St.", and the web site checks against the USPS's database, it will either reject it outright for having "special" characters, or will say, "We didn't find that, but we found this similar address - '123 Main St', which should we use?" It's so fucking dumb.

I sympathize, but it is a hard problem to solve. On the seller side, many orders come in with addresses that are just wrong, or missing suite numbers, business names, etc.

Ups and FedEx charge shippers ~$15 for each instance where they have to address correct.

So, yeah, the period thing is dumb, but automated correction is hard. Even experts, like SmartyStreets get it wrong often.

I had a fun issue signing up for a bank here in Japan.

Japanese people can't have middle names (the citizen registry doesn't allow it), but foreigners can, so many systems will reject spaces in the name field. Meanwhile they're meticulous about making sure your name matches your ID exactly, leading to the situation I had.

The bank's web signup form disallowed spaces in your name, so I wrote my name FIRSTMIDDLE. Then when they processed my application they sent me an email "Your name doesn't match your ID card! Please approve the change to 'FIRST MIDDLE'."

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