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Comment by frou_dh | Hacker News Reader

I've always found it weird when a form admonishes you for writing spaces or dashes in e.g. a phone number or credit card number. Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!

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> Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!

This is one of my most hated categories of pet peeves, software that does something in a way that causes a human to have to expend effort every time they use it which could easily be fixed by one-time effort on the developer's part, but the developer is either uninterested or hostile to the idea of fixing it. Computers exist to do the tedious stuff for us, if software makes us do tedious stuff for it that could be avoided with a bit more work on the software side then the software is wrong.

"Enterprise" software on Windows that "requires admin" has been a long time top subcategory here, where in literally 100% of cases I've ever dug in to in 20+ years of professional IT they could change a couple of default paths to point either within the user's private folders or a common user-accessible folder like ProgramData and solve it forever, but instead they tell people to give everyone local admin and people who don't know better actually listen to that idiocy while competent administrators are forced to fire up ProcMon and track down what it's doing so they can bodge around it by pushing out permissions changes or config changes through their management platform of choice.

> software that does something in a way that causes a human to have to expend effort every time they use it which could easily be fixed by one-time effort on the developer's part, but the developer is either uninterested or hostile to the idea of fixing it.

Yes, exactly! It's like devloper doesn't understand that automating thibgs like this is the point of computers.

Especially in the UK, bank sort codes are typically presented to the user as e.g. 04-00-04 by every banking app or website, but whenever you have to enter them (e.g. to pay someone else) they usually require you to not enter the dashes. Some of the most annoying sites limit the input to 6 characters but don't strip out the dashes, so you'd end up with 04-00- and then it complains.

And then there are the ones that implement it as 6 separate boxes, and these are the only fields in the form that auto advance to the next field on input and also often break delete if you want to undo the previous digit.

And of course you often cannot paste a 6-digit number into these fields. You have to type all 6 digits by hand.

This is a common frustration in Australia with the ABN (business numbers), they are 11 digits but commonly shown with spaces, including on the ABN registry. However many sites have the 11 character limit.

Hey, Monzo's Sort code, the first one to my knowledge to start with a zero. I spent six months unable to pay my council tax bill because their stupid system was treating the sort code as an integer and therefore dropping the leading zero, on the backend, before validating that it had six digits. At one point they asked me if I'd be willing to sign up for a different bank.

Not sure about whether it's the first to have a leading zero or not. Certainly the -04 at the end suggests it was one of the first in the 04- block, but then again most banks have multiple sort codes, so who knows.

I'm not really sure how these get allocated, but looking through some of my payment recipients, Revolut is also lowish in this block with 04-00-67, but also with leading zeros, Santander has 09-01-32 and 09-01-33, co-op has 08-92-99, Nationwide has 07-01-16, 07-08-06, 07-19-86.

That looks to me almost like potentially a bank can get a sort code block as large as just the first 2 digits, e.g. Nationwide which has been around for a long time and all seem to start 07-. But that doesn't explain then why Monzo and Revolut are both in the 04-00- block.

EDIT: it seems that sort codes are assigned by pay.uk [1] and Wikipedia has a surprising amount of information [2]. Most interestingly, originally banks were 2 digits long, and so each bank had their own 2 digit prefix, and the single digit banks had a zero appended, so e.g. NatWest was originally Westminster (6) and became 60-. There's a whole load of 04- sort codes for "Utility Banks" [3] and Monzo seems to have been the second such bank (BFC is before it, but 04-00-01 is unlisted, so maybe Monzo was the third).

[1] https://www.wearepay.uk/what-we-do/payment-systems/access-to...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sort_code

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sort_code#04_codes

I have a keyboard shortcut to easily enter my email address. On certain forms it inadvertently adds an invisible space at the end. So many forms complain that I didn’t enter a valid email address. They should be ignoring or stripping any trailing spaces!

In Canada our postal codes are formatted:

X#X #X#

Where X is a letter and # is a digit.

The amount of forms, even on government websites that can't do the unfathomably complicated logic of stripping the space if it doesn't want it is baffling.

Regarding your credit card example, in my password manager where I paste my credit card number from, I added a no-spaces copy of the number for me to paste in because practically every input on the internet accepts spaces but has a max character limit. So if I paste it in with the spaces, it'll cut off the last 3 digits, making me go back, delete the spaces, and manually type in my last 3 digits that were removed.

Not having the space looks and feels wrong, and I think the post office would agree. I have a feeling the trend toward space omission was due to fields formatted for US zips.

But you can just add the space back in! It’s a strict format of six characters, alternating digits and letters, with a space. There is no deviation. You can easily write a parser and a formatter for it. It kills me how often this is a struggle on forms.

Fun fact: even the “send a free letter to santa” is compliant by making his postal code “H0H 0H0”

It goes against Postels law, but it's much simpler and less error prone to only accept data in the representation you actually use for further processing, vs writing an ad-hoc parser and normalizer.

APIs, yes - humans, no.

For the longest time, US ATMs required you to enter the dollars AND cents you wished to withdraw - even though they NEVER dispensed coins.

Stupid, stupid, stupid software coders! Or possibly, a single coder somewhere long ago.

a password with a space at the end would be broken in many systems.

Does anyone even use passwords with spaces? I've always wanted to try and find out how many sites can't handle it.

I use spaces everywhere I can, it’s part of a pattern I use that’s easy for me to remember for when I have to enter it often, and the space usually counts as a special character. I’d say 90-95% of the time it works.

If you're living the passphrase life then spaces make them easier to type.

I do but then again I am different in that I built a secondary keyboard that (macro) types long passwords for me. Bank site: Shift H. Think of it as a password manager that has an encrypted index (my brain) using hardware and without the index is mess of random characters. Portable and external.

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