Can the Card Name (i.e. the cardholder name, not the card type) contain non-ASCII characters? Example: "JOSÉ GONZÁLEZ".
A:
The credit card processors I've used in the past only allowed ASCII in the cardholder name, but you should check with your credit card processor to see what their requirements/restrictions are.
Laurence Gonsalves
2010-01-05 06:44:14
FWIW, looking on Google Image Search for "jcb card" (A Japanese credit card) shows cards with ASCII cardholder names. If even Japanese credit cards use only ASCII, it seems posible that this limitation is universal.
Laurence Gonsalves
2010-01-05 06:47:41
+4
A:
The name is encoded into track one of the magnetic stripe on the card. It can contain only ascii characters
PaulG
2010-01-05 10:13:20
According to that link, it's not ASCII, but "ANSI/ISO ALPHA", which looks like the subset of ASCII from 0x20 to 0x5F mapped to 0x00...0x3F and an odd parity bit added to the end. The numbers look like ASCII from 0x30 to 0x3F mapped to 0x0...0xF and an odd parity bit added to the end. So there's not even lowercase letters, much less high-ASCII or any potential for UTF-8 support.
Mike DeSimone
2010-01-05 21:13:04
Yes it appears that far from being too strict (my app currently allows printable ASCII characters only), I'm actually being too lenient! However, I'm sure users would be annoyed if I start rejecting lower-case letters, so I'll probably leave it be. My main fear was that I was rejecting legitimate cards, so I'm relieved that this is not the case.
Mr Snrub
2010-01-05 23:18:47
I don't think you understand. There is no way to represent lowercase letters with the encoding on a credit card's magnetic stripe. They're not even in the character set.
Mike DeSimone
2010-01-07 17:49:43
I do understand. I just meant that from a usability perspective, users will get frustrated if the card name is rejected because they typed it in lower case. Therefore I'll just convert any lower case letters to upper case.
Mr Snrub
2010-01-08 01:39:44
In fairness, the card name is useless for almost all payments, the only exceptions being things like when paying for airline tickets or car rental by card (for which the data is captured for later criminal style investigations). Almost every time I'm asked for my name as printed on the card I type something like 'Mr Silly McDuff'.
PaulG
2010-01-08 09:31:35
A:
Indeed, only ASCII characters are allowed. But other manipulation is allowed. One can print the name on the first or the second line. One can choose with or without dots and so on.
So, you can't make the customer happy with diacrits (thinks Norwegian and German names). But you can the customer let choose between full firstname of only one character (e.g. JOSE GONZALES or J. GONZALES). It helps to make the customer happy.
robertnl
2010-01-05 21:02:03
A:
Mr Snrub
2010-01-05 23:36:57