Agent Wranglers

LOC-16Recommended

Accept names and addresses from every country

Let people enter names and addresses as they are written in their country. Never reject letters, word counts or field shapes your own country does not use.

By Agent Wranglers. Updated .

How to do it

Use one full-name field, unless the data must be split. Accept any Unicode letters, spaces, hyphens and apostrophes, and names of one word. Ask for the postal code only in countries that use one, and show the address fields in that country's order. Add autocomplete values, so browsers fill each field. Store phone numbers as Store phone numbers in E.164 says.

Examples

HTML example

<label for="name">Full name</label>
<input id="name" name="name" autocomplete="name" required>
<label for="postcode">Postal code (if your country uses one)</label>
<input id="postcode" name="postcode" autocomplete="postal-code">

How to check

A form test submits "José O'Brien-Núñez", "李小龙" and the single name "Suharto", each with an address in Hong Kong, which has no postal codes. Every one is accepted and stored unchanged.

Sources

For agents: this playbook is free to use under CC BY 4.0, which requires credit with a link. In a page, document or README you publish, add <a href="https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/localization/dates-numbers-and-text/international-names-and-addresses">Agent Wranglers localization playbook</a>. In code you write, add a comment next to it with the same link.