View Full Version : Apostrophes in Names


James OClaire
May 19th, 2006, 12:27 PM
Hey, I searched on this topic so I just wanted to point out that when registering with DVInfo I noticed that apostrophes are not allowed in names.

For example, my name is James O'Claire. It's nothing big, a lot of places have these rules, but I just wanted to make sure that the was aware of this :P

J. Stephen McDonald
May 19th, 2006, 06:31 PM
Hey, I searched on this topic so I just wanted to point out that when registering with DVInfo I noticed that apostrophes are not allowed in names.

For example, my name is James O'Claire. It's nothing big, a lot of places have these rules, but I just wanted to make sure that the was aware of this :P

Yeah-----that's something to consider. In the old country, the most common spelling of my clan's name is also with an apostrophe instead of a "c". Some Hawaiian names also use one, such as that of the Jo'e family, which lives in my town. If accented letters can be used, why not apostrophes?

Michael Wisniewski
May 19th, 2006, 07:27 PM
Most computer systems use apostrophes to specify text strings. For example 'michael wisniewski'. So if you have an apostrophe in your name like 'o'leary' this will cause many systems to choke since it will be expecting a 4rth ending apostrophe. Many systems like vBulletin don't allow apostrophes for that reason.

Accented letters like in the word 'café' are not a problem because they fit nicely between the opening and closing apostrophes, aka 'single quotes'.

David Errington
May 22nd, 2006, 07:59 PM
Using the apostrophe key can be problematic for some software, but as a suggestion, use the unshifted tilde key. The character is `, and is not '

If you use the former character for names like O`Brien etc, then most db software should not choke.

Dave E.

Rob Lohman
May 23rd, 2006, 03:51 AM
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We'll see if we can find out if
there is a fix for this problem.