What are all of the allowable characters for people's names? [closed]

Answer 1

There's good article by the W3C called Personal names around the world that explains the problems (and possible solutions) pretty well (it was originally a two-part blog post by Richard Ishida: part 1 and part 2)

Personally I'd say: support every printable Unicode-Character and to be safe provide just a single field "name" that contains the full, formatted name. This way you can store pretty much every form of name. You might need a more structured storage, but then don't expect to be able to store every single combination in a structured form, as there are simply too many different ones.

Answer 2

Depending on the complexity of your name structure I could see:

1. First Name
2. Middle Initial/Middle Name
3. Last Name
4. Suffix (Jr. Sr. II, III, IV, etc.)
5. Prefix (Mr., Mrs., Ms., etc.)

Answer 3

I don't think there's a definitive answer. After all, some people have names that can't even be expressed in UTF-16...

There are some odd people out there, who will give their kids the craziest of names, including putting in weird punctuation, accents that don't exist in their own language, etc.

However, you can place arbitrary restrictions on your database. If you want to you can insist on 7 bit ASCII names. It's slightly rude to users, but they'll live with it. It certainly makes searching easier.

My colleague's daughter is named Amélie. But even some (not all!) official British government web sites ("Please enter the name exactly as shown on the birth certificate") won't accept the unicode, so he has to use 'Amelie' instead.

Answer 4

I'm making software for driving schools in the USA, so to me what matters most what the state DMV's accept as a proper name on a driver's license. In my case, it would cause problems to allow names beyond what the DMV allows, even if such names were legal because the same name must later be used for a driver's license.

From StackOverflow, I still hadn't confirmed the answer I needed. And I happen to know that in my state (Calif) they're using AS400's with software probably written in COBOL, and to the best of my knowledge, those only support an 8-bit character set. (Is it EBCDIC?) Anyway... Ugh.

So, I called the California DMV... Sure enough, their system allows A-Z and spaces and absolutely nothing else. Not even hyphens are allowed -- Hyphens are replaced with spaces. In fact, apparently just to be difficult, they only use capitals. And names such as "O'Malley" must be replaced with OMALLEY.

Leave it to government. I must say I'm thrilled not to be a developer working for DMV. (Although I could really use that kind of salary.)