API docs say "no symbols" -- what does this mean?

[sneakyimp]

I was looking at the API reference here:

http://developer.authorize.net/api/reference/index.html#customer-profiles-update-customer-payment-pr...

I see that a great many of the fields say "no symbols." For instance, updateCustomerPaymentProfileRequest's input param billTo->firstName says the input should be:

Up to 50 characters (no symbols).

This is frustratingly vague. What does "no symbols" mean exactly? alphanumeric? are spaces allowed? dashes? periods? apostrophes (e.g., O'Malley)? What about unicode characters or emoji?

[Joy]

Hi sneakyimp,

Most of our fields all have the "no symbols" description because we only fully supports the ISO 8859-1 character set. It is likely that you will see errors when submitting other characters.

Thanks,

Joy

[sneakyimp]

Do you mean to say that all ISO 8859-1 characters (including non-print ones) are permissible? Also, if you support ISO 8859-1 there are a LOT of symbols in there including punctuation, accented characters, whitespace (tabs, spaces, etc.) and also slashes and backslashes and angle brackets and so on.

Surely you can provide more specific guidelines?

[sneakyimp]

Hello? Can you provide any more information?

[Trevor]

We support all of the printable characters that are contained within the ISO 8859-1 character set, including the symbols. In short, we support all of the characters visible here in the ISO 8859-1 character table on Wikipedia.