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.
Ah, yes, I live on “St Mary’ ; DROP TABLE street”
“we call it Drop street for short”
