How to pass “Null” (a real surname) to a SOAP web service?

This is terrifying.

Not because I am filled with empathy for all the Mr. and Mrs. Nulls out there, but because whoever wrote/designed this surely made more such mistakes. The stuff RCE is made of.

I just had a participant with a surname of Null sign up through a piece of software I’m responsible for. It was initially shocking, but seeing Null capitalized seemed good. All this time I thought Bobby Tables was just a scary myth!

I was dealing with XML via a REST interface the other day, and was amused by the fact that nulls are represented as an attribute named "null" with a value "true", but if not null, the attribute doesn't exist, which means it becomes an actual Null, which means, of course, False. But not "false".

And by "amused" I mean it made my head hurt when trying to figure out a clear and self-documenting way to write a few lines to decode it.

This reminds me of CP/M and MSDOS days when the OS imported a great deal of -invisible magic- to the name space ... three letter device names like CON, NUL, PRN ... and drivers could add their own.

This is from 2010.

This is terrifying.