topic Valid Characters in billing address in Integration and Testing

Valid Characters in billing address

Victor1 — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 22:44:12 GMT

Hello. New user and this question may seem obvious to everyone. In the API documentation, for the billing address fields, there is a phrase in parenteshis that says (no symbols). I am wondering if there is a list anywhere that explains exactly which characters are valid in these billing address fields used for AVS?

And then, what is the best practice for keeping invalid characters out of the billing data? I am thinking that I can either add validation on entry of the data, or I can just strip out invalid characters before sending the data.

Some characters, like ampersand or apostrophe are important to my customes and how they enter their business names, so I'd like to allow them to enter this data as they would normally. like "J&D Plumming" or "Bob's Pizza".

thank you

Re: Valid Characters in billing address

coppercup — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 23:27:00 GMT

Hi Victor1,

I'm not aware of a definitive list of the excluded "symbols" (could be one somewhere), but I can say that over many years and multiple integrations we've never run into any issues with first_name, last_name, company, or text string address fields containing common characters like apostrophes or ampersands.

I do know that HTML tags will not work in these fields, though, and we generally run all of our user input through a filter that strips tags first.

Fritz

Re: Valid Characters in billing address

coppercup — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 23:38:44 GMT

By chance, I just encountered this page covering the subject of field validation:

https://support.cybersource.com/cybskb/index?page=content&id=C1251

Fritz