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Duncan Edwards Jones wrote: Why do you need any rules at all?
Agreed. It's one of those conclusions that seems to take devs a while to get to. Rules for names? I don't even implement rules for email addresses. If I need your email to be genuine I'll send you an activation link, otherwise I'll make it optional and couldn't care less what you put in it.
Of course I always use "int" to store phone numbers cos that's just common sense!
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F-ES Sitecore wrote: Of course I always use "int" to store phone numbers
And ZIP codes! 
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Richard Andrew x64 wrote: And ZIP codes!
Yeah ... never mind that such area codes in other countries tend to have all sorts of alpha numerics in them.
And then you get the odd guy wanting to input his phoneword instead of a number ... since that's how he remembers it.
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The other "falsehoods" blogs are worth a read as well:
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Many of the time assumptions listed are stupid.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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There is no point in establishing rules for ASCII names - simply because most systems now use Unicode which allows Chinese, Persian, Hindi, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, ... you get the idea.
OK - I agree that name lookup is a problem with non-European names (and even some European style ones) but establishing rules for something that has pretty much been superseded already seems liek a waste of time and effort! 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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In a previous position I seemed to spend most of my time replacing characters that were 'reserved' in the system. It was an absolute nightmare and was the result of some clever so & so deciding to escape certain characters for some reason that was never fully explained.
Apostrophes, commas, ampersands, tildes, back slashes, forward slashes. I hate them all!
I may not last forever but the mess I leave behind certainly will.
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Well, here's the framework:
- A person has zero or more names, each consisting of zero or more characters.
- Surnames are given last, except in cultures where they are given first.
In cultures that give you names like those given to horses by breeder, have fun. - Everything else must remain unspecified lest we run into "year 2000-ish" problems when something new comes along.
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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What about "the artist previously known as Prince, now known as this rather odd looking squiggle"? 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I don't go on social media. It makes you itch.
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Except he changed back to "Prince" in 2000. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Only when he realised even he couldn't read his signature!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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And all because Warner Brothers took out a Trade Mark on his name.
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I can't see why should be any problem with any name - the only rule we have in our system, that the name can contain only printable characters...beside it it can be anything from the Unicode range...
If a system has problem with names, that's a problem with the developer and not with the name...For instance the name Null. After reading some articles about it, I'm still can't understand how it can be any problem...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote: After reading some articles about it, I'm still can't understand how it can be any problem...
Spending some time in QA will cure you of that! 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Yeah - the issue is not that either your language or your code or your database don't understand the difference between "Null" and NULL - they do - but do you have actual full control over every single line of code in your stack? Really? You use no libraries at all, for anything, including transport?
See this stackoverflow question for one example.
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I agree with the lack of a problem with Null as a last name at least as far as typed languages, but I suspect javascript or php may have issues depending on the kind of checks being done.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I can't see how...Even in JavaScript, where you not explicitly define types a string still a string and can not be confused with the predefined null...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Maybe they pass it through eval?
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote: For instance the name Null. After reading some articles about it, I'm still can't understand how it can be any problem
Try inserting it into a database and then have some fun retrieving it and running queries.
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Not the slightest problem there...With the right type (name is a string) 'Null' (any combination of small or capital letters) will never be the same as the SQL NULL or the .NET DBNull or the JavaScript null...
In the very basic level even NULL = NULL in SQL (the lowest level to access the data) evaluates to null...
So as I stated before - it is the problem of the developer if the system can not handle 'Null' (or other bizarre) as string...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Those of us who started work before computers and had to dig through whole drawers full of files marked J. Smith only to find that the one you actually wanted was on somebody else's desk in the other building find your need for 'rules' more than a touch amusing whilst also infinitely sad. Lord alone knows what you young people would do if you actually had to work for a living! 
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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What you are really looking for is a reliable way of uniquely identifying people. Name is good, but not adequate (see above re: J. Smith).
I worked for [a well known credit monitoring company] that needed to do this. Add to that the problem that, in some countries with multiple official languages (e.g., Canada), John Doe may be the same person as Jacques Doe.
It turns out that you can uniquely identify a person with a very small amount of extra information. For example, with full name, birth date, and current geographic location, you get something like 85% -- the problem here being ethnically common names like John Smith and Juan Gomez.
Add a birthplace and you approach 100%.
Basically, for most databases you need two fields for "name": a "Full Name" string, and a "Sort By" string. Add some software (commercial libraries are available) that takes care of the "John/Juan/Ivan/Jacques" problems, birthdate/place and current geography (zip code/postal code/city) and you can be nearly certain that you have the right person, and you can assign/retrieve a more convenient UID.
The rest of the problems (e.g., last name "NULL", punctuation, etc.) are solved with correct programming. If you have trouble with "NULL", you probably have bigger things to worry about (SQL injection hacks).
Freedom? That is a worship word.
-- Cloud William
The only thing a free man can be forced to do is die.
modified 1-Apr-16 11:47am.
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The Irish are born database killers. If we could just convince them to spell their names like O,Donald, then the tech world would be a happier place.
There's really no way to cover it all but to have super long name fields, last name optional, escape and encode/decode, and all that mess. Which, of course, makes indexing and searching so much more fun. I think we're probably all in the same boat trying to deal with a livable middle ground while dealing with the occasional edge-case headache.
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