It's not easy being Null.
March 26, 2016 1:27 PM   Subscribe

When Jennifer Null tries to buy a plane ticket, she gets an error message on most websites. The site will say she has left the surname field blank and ask her to try again. Reality aping fiction once again.
posted by signal (9 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: No biggie, but doesn't feel like this BBC link is so novel or expansive that there's really a reason to do this again three months after basically the same discussion from the again link. -- cortex



 
A guy who worked for us had a last name of "Myint". Every time I saw that database record I was sure it was a test or validation error message.
posted by sbutler at 1:41 PM on March 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


My wife has a really long name. So it is often true that she'll try to enter her name in an online form (or, more often a paper form) and there won't be enough space!

This happened a couple times on a specific airline site and here's the kicker: The airline insisted that the name she entered on the form must match the name on her passport. Fair enough, except her passport has her full, long name and the airline doesn't have enough space to accomodate it.

So, this meant discussions with agents who wouldn't let her board. Haven't flown that airline in a while so I wonder if they ever fixed this.
posted by vacapinta at 1:44 PM on March 26, 2016


Related: The Big List of Naughty Strings

Share it with your expectant cyberpunk friends.
posted by mccarty.tim at 1:48 PM on March 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


Also related: Little Bobby Tables (xkcd)
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:54 PM on March 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


It's amazing the fine BBC article repeats the exact same stupidity that leads to this bug in the first place.
This is because the word “null” is often inserted into database fields to indicate that there is no data there.
If you catch a programmer inserting the word "null" into database fields to indicate there is no data, please break their fingers for me. Or at least give them a gentle scolding.

Although to be honest I had this exact same bug in my own project recently. Turns out in Python json.dumps({}.get("foo")) is the string 'null'.
posted by Nelson at 2:00 PM on March 26, 2016 [3 favorites]


This comes up for me frequently because I have a hyphenated last name. Airline websites don't allow hyphens in the name fields, so my last names get smushed together and then they don't match the name in my passport. So someone at the gate has to call me up to check my ID, by trying to pronounce my last names as though they were all one word. It's 2016 airlines! Some people have hyphens in their last names!
posted by Dr. Send at 2:01 PM on March 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


I know someone whose last name has a space in the middle: "van Hoomison". He has no end of grief with those forms deciding that "van" is his middle name.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 2:03 PM on March 26, 2016


A lot of websites, particularly if they have a MS-SQL backend, don't like apostrophes. I've pretty much dropped the apostrophe from my name at this point. Although to date I haven't had anybody claim that O'Donnell is not equal to ODonnell. The TSA doesn't even care about that one.
posted by COD at 2:04 PM on March 26, 2016


The problem isn't using the value NULL to indicate an empty field, the problem is coercing a string into that type. If you have a varchar column, it will happily contain NULL as a string and not confuse it with NULL the reserved word. If only the front end developers were a bit smarter about it.
posted by wierdo at 2:04 PM on March 26, 2016


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