The word, used by computer scientists to mean ‘no value,’ has created long-running challenges
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When Your Last Name Is Null, Nothing Works
No, when people DON’T PROPERLY SANITIZE THEIR USER INPUT, nothing works!!!
Looks like little Bobby Tables has some extended family.
This seems to be old news, and paywalled.
Edit: gee, thanks MSN. The article i’d read was about the license plate.
Morgan Null, in black, with her parents and brother, all Nulls. lol
Not that rare of a name apparently…
Representatives for the internet provider she had used in her old apartment initially told her they couldn’t cancel her account because there was no last name associated with it.
She had been paying the company for months. She has since switched internet providers.
Are people this silly? Just stop paying them. They’ll figure out how to cancel the account.
Who the hell writes
if 'null'? If it’s a thing, what language would interpret a string like that?I’d bet it’s less simple input sanitizing and more 2 mistakes made separately because they don’t know any better.
- The input field converting everything to a string indiscriminately
- Because they did 1, converting everything back to the assumed type
If the front end Dev makes the first mistake, null would be sent in the body as “null”. Then on the backend, somebody might even be binding the variables correctly, but before hand realizing they have to deal with the market and rather than just have a conversation undoes it in their own code.
I’ve seen XML parsers that will convert element content from strings to native types by default. So “0” becomes an int, “true” becomes a boolean, and “null” becomes an actual null. I had to take extra steps to keep everything as a string unless explicitly told not to.
JSON does not have this problem, BTW.
I don’t think anyone actually chooses XML. There’s no reason to use it over JSON unless you need to.
XML can validate itself and there’s the self-documenting WSDL; so while it has more overhead and an ugly syntax it can make for a more stable and earlier to understand API for your API’s consumers.
This point is always stated about XML as if it were the most important part of choosing XML.
But jsonschema exists. It has the same capability.
Ah but… Nobody uses that! Because then you wouldn’t choose JSON
Taking the issue at face value, I wonder what Johnny Null’s workaround would be for his (or their) name?
N’ull? Nul-l? \Null? Null? JohnnyN ull?
Definitely not N’ull, that would trigger a SQL error when it can’t interpret the ull after the string delimiter.
If they’re not sanitizing that, they deserve to have their system broken lol
