Auto Emailing - Safeguards Part 1 - Special Characters

It is true that the best LIMS programs out there will offer special features like the auto emailing of results (and possibly invoices) to your customers. Even an affordable LIMS program should be able to provide this capability. To this email subject (no pun) we need to understand certain issues that can creep up.

Some special characters are allowable in an email address, like the apostrophe. The email address:

      liam.o'brien@notarealemailaddress.com

...is valid as far as SMTP is concerned. However, you are probably setting yourself up for a whole slew of unintentional heartache by having that special character in the email address.

There are a few reasons:

• The need to 'escape' the character in program code
• The possibility of conflicting ASCII values for similar text characters
• The simple fact that an apostrophe in an email address is incredibly rare (and thus, software developers rarely consider this)

Let's take a look at each of these items in more detail below:  

Escaping Characters

Escaping and URL Encoding are two techniques for dealing with certain types of "special characters". An example of escaping is when you are using code that cannot handle a single apostrophe as normal text, since a single apostrophe is a text delimiter.

What would have to happen is you'd have to double up the apostrophe in any text value if it is already inside a block of text that is being started and ended with single quotes (apostrophes).

An example of this would be in TSQL, the command line language for SQL Server:

Bad

     SET @Email =  'liam.o'brien@notarealemailaddress.com'

Good

      SET @Email = 'liam.o''brien@notarealemailaddress.com'

ASCII Issues

There are also some really interesting things that can happen when you are copying text from one editor to another, most notably from MS Word to almost anything else. In most contexts, you use the same keyboard key to type either a single quote or an apostrophe. However some text editors will supersede your wishes and alter the nature of some characters, like a right single quote (U+2019) vs an apostrophe (U+0027).

You need to be careful because in some systems, the characters are very different, where as in others they are the same. 

A true single quote or apostrophe has an ASCII value of 39. This true apostrophe is allowable in an email address, however what if the email address was first dumped into MS Word?

In MS Word, you can also have a left single quote (ASCII = 145) and a right single quote (ASCII = 146). Now, in SQL Server, with a typical collation of SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS, the same two ASCII values will map to the same actual characters as in MS Word. However, this is not necessarily true of other apps on your PC. 

The left and right single quotes are not valid for email addresses, so depending on how the email address was initially stored into a database is very important. If there was a cut and paste, it may have a character that looks like an apostrophe but that will not be recognized.

It might be better to simply stick with letters and numbers, but you certainly can't control what your customers may do. Just be careful when entering the email addresses into your LIMS software. If it has an apostrophe, make sure that it is not curved, but straight up and down. This will save you lots of troubleshooting later.

So, whether your lab has the easiest LIMS to set up on the planet, or it has a monster LIMS solution from a huge LIMS vendor, just make sure to scrutinize email addresses for this potential issue.

This will ensure that you have the best LIMS auto emailing experience possible.