These names need to be on those "things programmers believe about names that are false" lists closer to the top[2].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_Fake [2] - https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
There's a couple of people for you with legal names well past 500 characters, and that's just of Western European descent, where German-style compound words are rare.
For instance Pablo Picasso's full name is 103 characters (without whitespace): Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso
The last name's list on the other hand can be technically infinite but only the first two (from both: father and mother) are used normally.
You can have also as many pseudonyms as you want of course, but they aren't official names.
Just for fun, I wrote a quick query to pull the head from my DB.
NAME_LENGTH_CHARS, NAME_TEXT
91 'Mary Abigail KawenaʻUlaokalaniahiʻIakaikapoliopelekawahineʻAihonuaināleilehuaapele Wiggin Pukui'
85 'Upatissa Atapattu Bandaranayake Wasala Mudiyanse Ralahamilage Shirani Anshumala Bandaranayake'
83 'Wanisekara Bandaranayake Wasala Mudiyanse Ralahamilage Aluwihare Uda Walauwe Alick Aluwihare'
68 'Guido Georg Friedrich Erdmann Heinrich Adalbert Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck'
66 'Wasalakulathunga Wijekoon Mudiyanselage Duleeka Kumari Wijekoon Marapana'
65 'Clemens Erwein Heinrich Karl Bonaventura Freiherr von und zu Franckenstein'
59 'Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaisière'
58 'Weerasooriya Dissanayake Mudiyanselage Punchi Banda Dissanayake'
56 'Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis, seigneur de Saint-Évremond'
56 'Venerable Professor Kollupitiye Mahinda Sangharakkhitha Thera'
...
For instance:
#1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Kawena_Pukui
#2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirani_Bandaranayake
#3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alick_AluwihareOn the other hand, an ultra-long name that seems to be designed for testing overflows, in buffers mental or physical, is like a very different category to me.
The problem is that you still need to deal with unicode attacks, sql attacks, js attacks, css attacks, regex attacks, etc. There's nothing 'arbitrary' about sanitizing any user-inputted text field, and it's especially difficult to do so a culturally sensitive way.
It's a good problem you're solving though. It's a great job interview question to have people write some code and talk through, since to get someone's first name given their full name it takes maybe 20 minutes to write something that works 99% of the time, but then to write something that works 99.99% of the time it takes maybe 20 years.
I never understood why that's necessary in the first place. Simply have inputs called "full name" and "address" and let people type in whatever, similar to how many websites now have "name" and "title" (as in Mr, Mrs, Reverend, ...), which is a partial and culturally insensitive solution to a similar problem.
Nickname:
and then refer to them by their nickname, which can be whatever they like to be called, in whatever land they come from
and no programmer has to care about human naming conventions ever again
If you don’t write software under the assumption that every other developer and all your users are at best wildly incompetent and at worst outright malicious then you’re doing everything wrong.