2009/5/24 Yoz Grahame <y...@yoz.com>: > "please do not enter any phone number > punctuation characters as our programmer is far too inept to work out > how to filter them correctly"
Urgh, yes. "Please take some of your time to preprocess your input *exactly* the way we want it because our computer is much too stupid to be able to canonicalise it for us." Especially for fairly trivial-to-canonicalise such things as telephone or credit card numbers. My bank showed an annoying version of this for a while: German Bankleitzahlen (sort codes) are eight digits, nearly invariably written in groups of 3-3-2, separated by spaces (abc def gh). And my bank's online banking site had an 8-character field for Bankleitzahl... so if you copy and paste "abc def gh" into it, you end up with "abc def ". Feh. I'm sure similar things have been perpetrated with other fixed-length but usually-separated numbers such as credit card numbers or ISBNs. And let's not mention people who treat ZIP codes as numbers, deleting initial zeroes and all. Cheers, -- Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com>
