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Yahoo News has an interesting article on the problems caused when programmers (e.g. us) forget to allow apostrophes, hyphens and spaces in last name fields:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080221/...ophes_in_names
Maybe we all should take a vow not to forget our users of Irish, Dutch and Arab decent when we are programming our form validation routines.
It’s not only people’s names but also place name. I used to live near a town that had an apostrophe. I tried signing up to Rackshack for a sever but it wouldn't verify the details so I couldn't use them I had to instead go elsewhere, so its not always just for niceness but makes business sense too.
Towns and addresses too yes, I had a few problems from this issue with my compost tumbler shopping cart.
it's easy enough to remedy if you validate with regex expressions.
I've long had problems with scripts that chop off or alter part of my name. The result is that I've been denied credit, had refund checks go to the different people, and in some cases have customer representatives not be able to find me in their database because of how their script altered my name.