this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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[–] [email protected] 56 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

There are a frightening number of systems that don't allow "-", which isn't even an edge case. A lot of people - mostly women - hyphenate their last names on marriage, rather than throw their old name away. My wife did. She legally changed her name when she came of age, and when we met and married years later she said, "I paid for money for my name; I'm not letting it go." (Note: I wasn't pressuring her to take my name.) So she hyphenated it, and has come to regret the decision. She says she should have switched, or not, but the hyphen causes problems everywhere. It's not a legal character in a lot of systems, including some government systems.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

It boggles my mind how so many websites and platforms incorrectly say my e-mail address is 'invalid' because it has an apostrophe in it.

No. It is NOT invalid. I have been receiving e-mails for years. You just have a shitty developer.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

worst thing is, the regex to check email has been available for decades and it's fine with apostrophies

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Well, and remember: If in doubt, send them an e-mail. You probably want to do that anyways to ensure they have access to that mailbox.

You can try to use a regex as a basic sanity check, so they've not accidentally typed a completely different info into there, but the e-mail standard allows so many wild mail addresses, that your basic sanity check might as well be whether they've typed an @ into there.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

The regexes are written to comply with RFC 5332 and 6854

They are well defined and you can absolutely definitively check whether an address is allowable or not.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5322

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 minutes ago

Yeah, I'm just saying that the benefit of using such a regex isn't massive (unless you're building a service which can't send a mail).

a@b is a syntactically correct e-mail address. Most combinations of letters, an @-symbol and more letters will be syntactically correct, which is what most typos will look like. The regex will only catch fringe cases, such as a user accidentally hitting the spacebar.

And then, personally, I don't feel like it's worth pulling in one of those massive regexes (+ possibly a regex library) for most use-cases.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

Ugh and that happens a lot if your email domain has an even slightly unusual TLD too.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

And you'd think a simple solution is just leave out the hyphen when you put you name in, but that can also lead to problems when the system is looking for a 100% perfect match.

And good luck if they need to scan the barcode on your ID.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Then the first part is interpreted (in the US, anyway) as a middle name, not as part of the last name. I did run into a recently married woman who did that: dropped her middle name, moved her last to the middle, and used her spouse's last name.

More commonly, places that don't take hyphens tend to just run the two names together: Axel-Smith becomes AxelSmith.

Programmers can be really dumb.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago

My mom didn't hyphenate, but she does include her maiden name when writing her full name, after her middle name. It never even occurred to me that that's uncommon.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

As someone who's mexican I encounter that more than one would think since I have 2 last names and it gets weird sometimes since I also have a middle name.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago

I have come across a shockingly large amount of people who not only have a hyphenated last name but also have a hypenated first name! Dealing with every new computer system is like a new adventure