[Taxacom] [ExternalEmail] Re: valid characters in scientific names?

[Doug Yanega]

>Hi Dave, all,
>
>Eric is correct with regard to valid names, but other diacritical 
>marks (and even numbers, e.g. 4-maculatus, later represented as 
>quadrimaculatus) can occur in non-valid (synonymised) names, and/or 
>names as originally published; also spaces and hyphens. So it 
>depends whether your system needs to hold these synonyms/non valid 
>names too...

You'd better hope not - some of them are characters not even in the 
extended ASCII set, like one bee species whose epithet included a 
symbol resembling an upside-down capital T (the shape of the clypeal 
marking). A colleague had to publish this in a journal, as part of 
his thesis revising the genus, and it evidently required the printer 
to manually design a special die for the printing press.

Wonderful things happened before the Code. ;-)
-- 

Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314        skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82