Once I was tasked with doing QA testing for an app which was planned to initially go live in the states of Georgia and Tenessee. One of the required fields was the user's legal name. I therefore looked up the laws on baby names in those two states.

Georgia has simple rules where a child's forename must be a sequence of the 26 regular Latin letters.

Tenessee seemed to only require that a child's name was writable under stone writing system, which would imply any unicode code point is permissible.

At the time, I logged a bug that a hypothetical user born in Tenessee with a name consisting of a single emoji couldn't enter their legal name. I reckon it would also be legal to call a Tenessee baby 'John '.

[–] dan@upvote.au 2 points 17 minutes ago

Sounds like you did a thorough job as a QA tester. As a software engineer, I love to see it.

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 22 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

No, cause "John\nDoe" messes up my regex. Sorry, out of the question. I'm not good with regex.

[–] frayedpickles@lemmy.cafe 32 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Can I kill someone who wants to do this? How do I legally get away with it?

[–] LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world 12 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Plead permanent sanity. If I was the judge I would let you go.

[–] frayedpickles@lemmy.cafe 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Thanks bro

[–] LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

I gotchu

[–] takeheart@lemmy.world 13 points 3 hours ago (4 children)

Na, names are about pronunciation (how you call someone). Written letters are an approximation of that. You can't pronounce a newline, so there's that.

[–] stringere@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 hour ago

Just pronounce \n as a glottal stop.

[–] BatmanAoD@lemmy.world 8 points 2 hours ago

But differently spelled names are legally distinct.

[–] watersnipje@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 2 hours ago

John
(long pause)
Doe

[–] kogasa@programming.dev 2 points 2 hours ago

But something has to be written on the birth certificate and social security card, and that's what everything else will expect you to use. I think just due to technical limitations (e.g. of the printer/template for those things) it wouldn't be allowed, but I dunno about legally

[–] rambling_lunatic@sh.itjust.works 46 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Sibling of Bobby Drop Tables

[–] funkyfarmington@lemmy.world 9 points 5 hours ago

Y'all need to learn how to sanitize your inputs!

[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 16 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

A line break is a non-printable character. So it would only work in the scope of electronic storage. The minute it hits other media, the line break character is subject to how that media handles it’s presence, and then it is lost permanently from that step forward.

Plus, many input forms make use of validation that will just trim anything that isn’t a character or number, removing the line break character.

[–] piecat@lemmy.world 1 points 12 minutes ago

A line break doesnt have to be electronic only. You just... start a new line on the paper.

If it were somehow legally allowed, the sanitization would be incorrect.

[–] Atomic@sh.itjust.works 38 points 6 hours ago (6 children)

Not legal in Sweden. Our "IRS" must also accept the name and deem it legal.

I for one like this. As it stops some very stupid people to name their children some very stupid names. Such as "Adolf Hitler".

And yes. Someone did try to name their child this and they were appropriately stoped from doing it.

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[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

Be funny as fuck if Canada started extradition procedures when he landed

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