Leap card fada saga

sabrewolfe

I was surprised to see a lot of online newspapers commenting today the NTA is getting flack for not using the síneadh fada in peoples names.

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/transport-and-tourism/activists-criticise-nta-for-failing-to-put-fadas-on-leap-cards-1.3764402

https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/no-excuse-for-absence-of-fada-on-public-transport-cards-898883.html

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/national-transport-authority-slammed-over-13884676

It strikes me as really odd in this day and age that a company claims they cannot use a fada due to technical limitations. Whats surprised me even more was that I actually have a personalised leap card that I got late last year and it includes all three fada's in my name, is this a case of them not being specific enough in their reporting or is it an issue they now seem to have fixed.

Would anyone have any other examples of Irish companies that are woeful when it comes to the use of fada's in peoples names, or for that matter companies or banks who are really good about it?

vectorvictor

Aer Lingus and many airlines can't accept fadas - this is mainly due to operating on billion year old reservation systems.

Ryanair can manage it

Poll Dubh

Needs to be a legal requirement for all companies in Ireland whether private or state owned to be able to process the spelling of names correctly. They are unwilling to do it out of common courtesy.

Mearings

No mention of the búilte?

listermint

well tbh alot of Software systems and API's do not handle them well. Characters can cause all sorts of problems in IT systems and integrations that people cant comprehend.


And no its never just a simple fix either.

Poll Dubh

listermint wrote: »

well tbh alot of Software systems and API's do not handle them well. Characters can cause all sorts of problems in IT systems and integrations that people cant comprehend.


And no its never just a simple fix either.

Again, lack of common courtesy - it’s too inconvenient for IT programmers to spell the names correctly.

quietsailor

Does the fada constitute a legal part of your name? As in if you fare evade on the luas and give a leap card as your proof of ID can you refuse a fine? It would be way to get them to quickly change the system!

listermint

Poll Dubh wrote: »

Again, lack of common courtesy - it’s too inconvenient for IT programmers to spell the names correctly.

Again, what?

Courtesy , is it?

You clearly didn't understand my post or want to understand it. that much is obvious.

An gal gréine

Seán is a person's name.
Sean = old...nothing to do with the name.
The accents are an integral part of the French language, do they have the problems we have in Ireland?
The accent (síneadh fada) is an integral part of the Irish language.

Hurrache

listermint wrote: »

well tbh alot of Software systems and API's do not handle them well. Characters can cause all sorts of problems in IT systems and integrations that people cant comprehend.


And no its never just a simple fix either.

It's often an issue with legacy systems or data migration. However afaik the Leap system is tailored for Ireland so it probably should have been there from the outset.

Having said that, I still can't send meeting invites from the Google Calendar android app to anyone with an apostrophe in their email address.

Edit, just to add, I've heard from others too that they have a Leap card with the fada in the name which leads me to think that there's no issue with the back end, it must be with a portal or front end API .

Crock Rock

Is cuma le CIE. Is an-éasca é litreacha "leis an fada" cur ar chártaí aitheantais. Is iad an cuid is mó do dhoine sa seirbhís phoiblí dúr agus leisciúil. Níl fadhb ar bith sa Ghearmáin nó an Fhrainc litreacha leis an "umlaut nó accent" a chur ar chártaí aitheantais.

Gabh mo leithscéal ar mo chuid chaighdeán Ghaeilge. Tá sé bhlianta ó shin ar mo chuid ardteist.

oLoonatic

Poll Dubh wrote: »

Again, lack of common courtesy - it’s too inconvenient for IT programmers to spell the names correctly.

Pesky americans not sorting out their character sets to show a digit that doesn't exist in their language.

Crock Rock

oLoonatic wrote: »

Pesky americans not sorting out their character sets to show a digit that doesn't exist in their language.

ClichÉ
Éclair
EntrÉe


Accents, which are equivalent to fadas, very much DO exist in the English language for loanwords.

oLoonatic

Crock Rock wrote: »

ClichÉ
Éclair
EntrÉe


Accents, which are equivalent to fadas, very much DO exist in the English language for loanwords.

Touché

But not all character sets include all our letters. Yes i think something can be done. But backend development for programs outside what is already pre written is expensive. so companies will just says its not possible.

dubhthach

UTF-8 was first implemented in 1992 in 'Plan 9 from Bell Labs' -- it was created by Ken Thomspson (the father of Unix) and Rob Pike -- both of whom subsequently worked at Google where they created the 'Go' programming language (Ken is basically retired now).

a formal RFC (request-for-comments) describing UTF-8 for use on Internet was published in 1996 in RFC2044 (as hosted by IETF -- Internet Engineering Task Force):
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2044

UTF-8 became the most common used encoding on the internet circa 2008 an now makes up about 80-90% of all web content


Every operating system released in the last 20 years have supported some form of Unicode (be it UTF-16 or/and UTF-8). All of the fada's are part of the basic character plane in Unicode, it's not like we are dealing with the old ponc's (ḃ ċ ḋ ḟ ġ ṁ ṗ ṡ ṫ) or the ⁊ (Trionian et -- agus).

The fact is the Leap card should have been designed with full Unicode support from the very beginning. Needless to say depending on what platform they are using, it's not that hard to migrated from legacy US-ASCII to UTF-8. After all US-ASCII (7-bit) forms the first 128 characters of UTF-8 codespace.

Needless to say they could use 'punycode' as a work around, this is the system used by the gloabl DNS (Domain Name System) to allow for IDN's (Internationalised Domain names). Basically it's a system that converts in either direction a specifically formated string from US-ASCII <-> UTF8

eg. punycode: xn--sen-fla == seán (UTF-8)

As you can see the punycode has specific formating (starting with xn--)

so for example the domain: éire.ie -- is recorded as xn--ire-9la.ie within the underlying zonefile for ie. -- software that does DNS resoultion (that isn't ancient) knows to autoconvert éire.ie to xn--ire-9la.ie or from xn--ire-9la.ie to éire.ie

The reason for such a system is that the core standards of DNS do not support non US-ASCII characters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name