Not the OP, but immigration often involves changing your name in the way digital systems store and display it. For example, from محمد to Muhammad or from 陳 to Chen. The pronunciation ideally should stay the same, but obviously there's often slight differences. But if the differences are annoying or confusing, someone might choose an entirely different name as well.

For example in Iceland you don't have to name the baby immediately, and the registration times are different for foreign parents.https://www.skra.is/english/people/registration-of-children/...

Of course then you may fall foul of classic falsehood 40: People have names.

With plenty of attitude of course :)

I've only ever interacted with freeform textfields when inputting my name, so most regular systems clearly don't dare to attempt this.

But if somebody was dead set on only serving local customers or having only local personnel, I can definitely imagine someone being brave(?) enough.

The name a system knows you as doesn’t need to correspond to your legal name or what you are called by others.

> Surely, any service only catered only to "naturally born citizen" is discriminatory and illegal?

No, that's also a question that is culturally dependent. In some contexts it's normal and expected.

I read that Iceland asks people to change their names if they naturalise there (because of the -sson or -dottir surname suffix).

But your point stands - not everyone in the system will follow this pattern.

Obviously, foreigners just living or visiting here will not have our strictly local names (thinking otherwise is what would be "silly"). Locals (people with my nationality, so either natural or naturalized citizens) will (*).

(*) I read up on it though, and it seems like exceptions can be requested and allowed, if it's "well supported". Kinda sours the whole thing unfortunately.

> is discriminatory and illegal?

Checked this too (well, using Copilot), it does appear to be illegal in most contexts, although not all.

But then, why would you want to perform name verification specific to my culture? One example I can think of is limiting abuse on social media sites for example. I vaguely recall Facebook being required to do such a thing like a decade ago (although they definitely did not go about it this way clearly).

It's not just business necrssary, it's also mandatory to do rigjt under gdpr

In legitimate retail, take the money, has always been the motto.

That said, recently I learned about monetary policy in North Korea and sanctions on the import of luxury goods.

Why Nations Fail (2012) by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...

The non-joke answer for Europe is extened Latin, dashes, spaces and apostrophe sign, separated into two (or three) distinct ordered fields. Just because it's written in a different script originally, doesn't mean it will printed only with that on your id in the country of residence or travel document issued at home. My name isn't written in Latin characters and it's fine. I know you can't even try to pronounce them, so I have it spelled out in above mentioned Latin script.

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/327/

Prince is still mostly screwed, even without spurious validation; Unicode doesn't allow personal symbols. Some discussion here: https://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UM...

Prince: "Get over yourself and just use your given name." (Shockingly, his given name actually is Prince; I first thought it was only a stage name)

Musk: Tell Elon to get over his narcissism enough to not use his children as his own vanity projects. This isn't just an Elon problem, many people treat children as vanity projects to fuel their own narcissism. That's not what children are for. Give him a proper name. (and then proceed to enter "X Æ A-12" into your database, it's just text...)

And the transliteration in this case is so far from the original that it's barely recognisable for me (three out of four characters are different and as a native I perceive Ł as a fully separate character, not as a funny variation of L)

If you're dealing with a bad API that only takes ASCII, "Celje" is usually better than "ÄŒelje" or "蒌elje".

If you have control over the encoding on the input side and on the output side, you should just use UTF-8 or something comparable. If you don't, you have to try to get something useful on the output side.

Most places where telling Štefan from Stefan is a problem use postal numbers for people too, or/and ask for your DOB.

So? Names are not unique to begin with.

That only works if you’re concatenating the first and last name fields. Some people have no last name and thus would fail this validation if the system had fields for first and last name.

See point 40 and 32-36 on Falsehoods programmers believe about names[1]

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

What if my name is

Or Derek <wood dropping on desk>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ

It's not exactly a bell, but there are clicks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1614k...

I can finally change my name to something that represents my personality: ^G^C

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-Text_character

The reminds me of a few Thai colleagues who ended up with a legal first name of "Mr." (period included), probably as a result of this.

Buying them plane tickets to attend meetings and so on proved fairly difficult.

But C0 and C1 control codes are out, probably.

> Or unpaired surrogates.

That’s just an invalid Unicode string, then. Unicode strings are sequences of Unicode scalar values, not code points.

> unassigned code points

Ah, the tyranny of Unicode version support. I was going to suggest that it could be reasonable to check all code points are assigned at data ingress time, but then you urgently need to make sure that your ingress system always supports the latest version of Unicode. As soon as some part of the system goes depending on old Unicode tables, some data processing may go wrong!

How about Private Use Area? You could surely reasonably forbid that!

> fullwidth characters

I’m not so comfortable with halfwidth/fullwidth distinctions, but couldn’t fullwidth characters be completely legitimate?

(Yes, I’m happy to call mathematical bold, fraktur, &c. illegitimate for such purposes.)

> solved with NFKC normalization

I’d be very leery of doing this on storage; compatibility normalisations are fine for equivalence testing, things like search and such, but they are lossy, and I’m not confident that the lossiness won’t affect legitimate names. I don’t have anything specific in mind, just a general apprehension.

Explanation for those not accustomed, based on <https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44/#GC_Values_Table> (with my own commentary):

Cc: Control, a C0 or C1 control code. (Definitely safe to reject.)

Cn: Unassigned, a reserved unassigned code point or a noncharacter. (Safe to reject if you keep up to date with Unicode versions; but if you don’t stay up to date, you risk blocking legitimate characters defined more recently, for better or for worse. The fixed set of 66 noncharacters are definitely safe to reject.)

Cs: Surrogate, a surrogate code point. (I’d put it stronger: you must reject these, it’s wrong not to.)

Co: Private_Use, a private-use character. (About elf names, I’m guessing samatman is referring to Tolkien’s Tengwar writing system, as assigned in the ConScript Unicode Registry to U+E000–U+E07F. There has long been a concrete proposal for inclusion in Unicode’s Supplementary Multilingual Plane <https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/>, from time to time it gets bumped along, and since fairly recently the linked spec document is actually on unicode.org, not sure if that means something.)

Cf: Format, a format control character. (See the list at <https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/list-unicodeset.jsp?a=[...>. You could reject a large number of these, but some are required by some scripts, such as ZERO-WIDTH NON-JOINER in Indic scripts.)

Very interesting about Japan!

To be clear, I wasn't thinking about within a specific country though.

More like, what is the set of all characters that are allowed in legal names across the world?

You know, to eliminate things like emoji, mathematical symbols, and so forth.

Yes, though O’Brien is Ó Briain in Irish, according to Wikipedia. I think the apostrophe in Irish names was added by English speakers, perhaps by analogy with "o'clock", perhaps to avoid writing something that would look like an initial.

There are also English names of Norman origin that contain an apostrophe, though the only example I can think of immediately is the fictional d'Urberville.

Ha, well I don't think we need to worry about validating characters if they can't be typed in a text box in the first place. ;)

But very interesting thanks!

Oh that's interesting.

Is that a thing? I've never known of anyone whose legal name used two alphabets that didn't have any overlap in letters at all -- two completely different scripts.

Would a birth certificate allow that? Wouldn't you be expected to transliterate one of them?

Click characters are part of {Alphabetic}!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/category/Lo

https://stackoverflow.com/a/4843363

> There’s this individual’s name which involves a clock sound: Nǃxau ǂToma

I was extremely puzzled until I realized you meant a click sound, not a clock sound. Adding to my confusion, the vintage IBM 1401 computer uses ǂ as a record mark character.

That's part of {Alphabetic} in Unicode. It validates.

beautiful map of the Catalan Countries when you search for that name here

Mrs. Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele only had a string length problem, but there are people with a Hawaiian ʻokina in their names. U+02BB

This is all well and good until the company looses real money becaus some other system you are interfacing with got compromised because of your attitude and fingers start being pointed. Defense in depth is a thing.

There might be more than just 2 ends. And some of them may not be fixable by you.