[comrade1234]

The USA government can't even handle ü. I was filling out a simple form to replace my damaged passport. I live in Zürich but it couldn't handle the umlaut. I never know what to do in this situation - do I use 'ue' instead, which is most common in Europe, or do I just use 'u' which is wrong but usually works in America. I didn't even bother checking with 'ue' and just went with 'u'

Ü isn't even a special character or utf-8 - ü is part of ascii. How does this even fail? Is their database a 7-bit database?

[daemonologist]

There's no ü in ASCII (the 1967 US-ASCII everyone thinks of, anyways, which is all you can expect from the government). It's in ISO 646:CH though, where it replaces '}', and in Latin 1.

[MisterTea]

> Is their database a 7-bit database?

Ascii is 7 bits. What people think of as 8-bit ASCII is actually code page 437, the alternate characters added to the PC BIOS in the original IBM PC. Like UTF-8 it uses the most significant bit in a 1 byte ASCII char to determine if it should use a character from ASCII if 0 or the extended 437 characters which includes ü if 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437

[umanwizard]

Do people think of this as 8-bit ASCII ? I've never heard of it referred to ASCII until now. In fact, I've never heard of it at all (by the time I was old enough to know what a character encoding was, Latin-1 and Windows-1252 were totally dominant IIRC).

[int_19h]

In DOS days, codepage 437 was commonly referred to as "ASCII" colloquially in countries where some other encoding was in use for the national script.

[umanwizard]

Interesting to know, thanks!

[MisterTea]

Yup, what the GP said. It was a common mistake for people to assume ASCII included CP 437 characters back in the DOS days. Even I made that assumption when I was a kid.

[criddell]

'u' isn't wrong in America. We spell it Zurich. And in China, it's 苏黎世 (or at least that's what Google tells me).

[pixl97]

Don't think of government ascii as the entire ascii code page. Instead think of it as what's on a typewriter. You get 0-9 and A-Z along with a few punctuation characters.

[krior]

Not very helpful - my typewriter has an ü :)

[pixl97]

And I'm sure Chinese typewriters have a totally different charset then German ones.

[marcellus23]

But do American English typewriters have a ü?

[integralid]

ASCII is a 7-bit code. Ü is not a part of ASCII any more than say Ł is (it's in one of many 8-bit extensions of ASCII)

[technothrasher]

Heck, they can't even handle that my last name has more than one capital letter in it.

[immibis]

ü is not part of ascii. Are you thinking of latin-1?

[comrade1234]

Oh that makes sense. ASCII is 7-bit. so they could be depending on old 7-bit databases.

[db48x]

No, they can only use what shows up on the keyboard. Internally the software is a vast mix of systems that in practice can probably handle unicode just fine by now. It's just that the people can't type any of those characters.

[QuantumNomad_]

Option plus u on US English keyboard on macOS gives you the umlaut, and then hit u again and you have ü.

But I wouldn’t bother memorising that and every other possible way that the other person has to press the keys depending on their keyboard layout and operating system. I’d just tell people to put u instead.

[db48x]

You can’t expect a bureaucrat to know about that kind of thing! If it’s not printed on a key right in front of their nose then no government employee is going to be able to type it in.

But that’s not really the point. No matter how many keyboard shortcuts the clerk at the DMV memorizes there is always going to be some text that they just cannot reproduce accurately. Whether it’s an accented character from the exotic land of Spain or some real Zalgo, something is going to get lost. No individual human can correctly deal with all possible textual forms.

[adastra22]

This is probably a Dosbox system from the 90’s, with COBOL batch processing in the backend.

[nemomarx]

if they can't type it on a keyboard when manually copying it from one place to another they'll drop it is what I've come to expect.

[umanwizard]

> Ü isn't even a special character or utf-8 - ü is part of ascii

That is not true. Type “man ascii” on macOS or Linux to see everything that is part of ascii.