Aside

No dashes or spaces

20 Mar 2010

It’s amusing to see what kind of little things can really get under a person’s skin. And then the lengths they’ll go in an attempt to right that wrong.

Credit card numbers are always printed and read aloud in groups of (usually) four digits, and when verifying a number after entry (which involves looking back and forth between the card and the web form) one uses the spacing to resynchronize.

If there were some security or integrity reason for disallowing these characters, I guess I’d buy it, but I’ve not found a single good reason for it. The consensus among those that I’ve spoken to is that it’s nothing but lazy, sloppy programming. I completely agree.