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 7 points 2 hours ago

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

[–] iAvicenna@lemmy.world 7 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

why settle for \n when you can go for the stylish carriage return

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

¿Porqué no los dos? A nice \r\n, Windows style.

[–] QuazarOmega@lemy.lol 1 points 1 hour ago

Gotta band it Windows tho, it just feels right, I want to enjoy my fake typewriter

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 27 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

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

[–] frayedpickles@lemmy.cafe 38 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world 16 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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

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

Thanks bro

[–] LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

I gotchu

[–] takeheart@lemmy.world 15 points 5 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 8 points 3 hours ago

Just pronounce \n as a glottal stop.

[–] BatmanAoD@lemmy.world 10 points 4 hours ago

But differently spelled names are legally distinct.

[–] watersnipje@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 4 hours ago

John
(long pause)
Doe

[–] kogasa@programming.dev 2 points 4 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 47 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Sibling of Bobby Drop Tables

[–] funkyfarmington@lemmy.world 11 points 6 hours ago

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

[–] Atomic@sh.itjust.works 39 points 8 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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[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 17 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (2 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.

[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

As someone with a very mildly unusual name, I can tell you that it doesn't matter whether a system could or could not meaningfully represent the name. Often the people or systems just refuse to acknowledge any deviation from what's expected. Sometimes databases are written to enforce arbitrary grammatical rules that make my name impossible to write, or the people using the systems will just "correct" the "error" without telling me. I don't mind that much but our normative systems just love to homogenise us.

[–] ruk_n_rul@monyet.cc 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Because sadly we live in a society, and normal names are required for the functioning of society.

[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 0 points 57 minutes ago* (last edited 56 minutes ago)

No they're not. They're required for us to be catalogued and managed by a state, to our detriment and the enrichment of the ruling class.

"Normality" is a fucking scam that keeps your imagination in check, so you never look outside your assigned box and realise you don't have to belong to anyone.

You have no idea how much genocidal violence has been done to condition our society to accept a dystopic phrase like "normal names are required for the functioning of society".

Your mind has been caged.

[–] piecat@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours 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.

[–] Bookmeat@lemmy.world 63 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (16 children)

Not legal in Canada. Your legal name must use Latin characters only. This is a sore point for indigenous people.

[–] MonkeMischief 2 points 4 hours ago

Which is both entirely understandable, and also tragic because Canada's indigenous written characters are so cool. :D

But also, it's gotta be neat having a name among your people, that "the state" has nothing to do with...

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