I’m really confused about the arguments around this, being that things like apostrophes and hyphens have special meanings in databases.
Yes, they do… But there are incredibly mature standard practices around how to store and query this type of data so that it isn’t a problem.
Hyphens and apostrophes aren’t uncommon in surnames. Is anyone suggesting banning those?
"All punctuation will be considered but avoided where possible because street names and addresses, when stored in databases, must meet the standards set out in BS7666.
“This restricts the use of punctuation marks and special characters (e.g. apostrophes, hyphens and ampersands) to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems.”
This seems like a dumb line of reasoning. The problem has never been the signs or punctuation in a database. It’s that the people in charge don’t even know what BS7666 even says.
We have a piece of legacy software and we have to replace certain symbols in text values as there’s manual SQL construction everywhere and none of it uses parameters.
How did they ask all these random people and not bother to ask a single software engineer?
“Hi is this excuse real, or is it just a sign of an inappropriate relationship between the local council and a dodgy software company that pays more dividends than developers? Oh it’s the latter? Okay, thanks.”
Wait, is this about SQL injection? Are they admitting that If I paste a piece of paper that says '; drop table streets; -- over their street sign it’ll fuck all their shit up?
If so, this is not a problem that should be fixed by changing the street signs.
Or is the problem that they’ve got people with limited technical skill manually constructing SQL queries to search these “geographical databases” and not knowing how to properly escape them?
Or did some intern developer neglect to use a parameterized query and something broke and the management chain at the North Yorkshire Council who don’t even know what pebkac stands for heard “apostraphies are the problem?”
Maybe they’ve got some image recognition thing on their mail trucks and the apostrophies mess up the otherwise-monospace letter spacing?
Whatever the case, the whole idea of taking the apostrophies off the signs seems ridiculous to me.
So North Yorkshire Council just announced to the whole world that its systems are vulnerable to SQL injection and it’s easier to replace the signs than to fix the software?
