Please enter the five-digit ZIP code

[space-time]

0XXXX (like so many zip codes on the East Coast). The web page ignores the zero, and spits back XXXX (only 4 digits) and gives me an error like I don't know what five-digit means. Ahh...

[cbelt3]

Bad Programming 101. Leading zeroes are to be ignored. Unless they are not to be ignored.

[OWC Jamie]

Have never seen this and I enter leading and ending zero zip code a lot

would seem to be very basic look for 5 digits code


edit: would come in handy if I was selling all the stuff from my business and I didn't want anyone ( competition) on the East coast to get their mitts on it.

[bazookaman]

I remember filling out an online form once whereupon entering my 4 character last name, the form errored out and told me my last name needed to be at least 5 characters.

[GGD]

bazookaman wrote:
I remember filling out an online form once whereupon entering my 4 character last name, the form errored out and told me my last name needed to be at least 5 characters.

Imagine the problems that people like Cher and Prince have.

[JoeH]

I saw this problem all of the time with one of the computer related price search sites, shopper.com maybe? It was that way starting years ago. I put in a number of reports about the problem but they never fixed the site. In the end I stopped using the site for price searches because I could never get price comparisons based on total cost of the product plus shipping.

[TLB]

bazookaman wrote:
I remember filling out an online form once whereupon entering my 4 character last name, the form errored out and told me my last name needed to be at least 5 characters.

My son has two "middle" names. Seems like almost no one has programmed for that occurrence. Put both in the middle name field with a space and you have an illegal character or it defaults to the first entry or it complains about too many characters for the field. Never got his HS diploma correct and now he is worried about getting both names on a college diploma.

[Buzz]

The beauty of programming, as belty notes, is that you can always count on the users to find and exploit any and every possible mistake, or loophole, or coding boo boo, to come up with interesting results...

East coast leading zero zip code? At least 5 characters for a name? Multiple middle and/or last names? How about throwing up a dialog box (or two, or whatever) to query and adjudicate any non-standard entry? The back end programming need only be as complicated as the boss wants to pay for... it can check and validate every possible scenario, or toggle a do not validate key for that record (so that somebody has to do it manually later). Run an error checker upon submit for each page is pretty standard to flag any bad/missing data. I get the feeling that a lot of programming is done by people/kids that aren't really clued in as to real world data entry, or are from some other country that doesn't have the same issues that we have here, so they're simply not familiar with the possible exceptions... boss says provide for "5 digit numeric zip code", and maybe they know the Red Sox won the World Series in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, but they don't know the zip code of Fenway Park has a leading zero. Boss says use 5 characters of name (for some fixed record length thingy), rather than "create an algorithm based on 5 characters of name, and if anme is less than 5 characters, normalize the algorithm using these specific characters...".

A lot of bad programming really boils down to a bad set specs in the beginning, so when you come across something that is out of whack, just realize your frustration is likely caused by poor communication between the spec-or and spec-ee.

[neophyte]

I bet it would have been fixed already if it truly was an "East Coast" problem, but its really just a "New England" problem. If it works in New York, then its acceptable.

[JoeH]

Speaking of names being at least 5 characters, years back one of the students I dealt with had the last name of "O". That's right, the single letter O. Most of the software we had dealt with it okay, but I can imagine the potential problems that he could have run into and still may experience.