Company Name on API verses Website Company Name Issue

[mh.hunt]

Hello - I was looking at this company on the website;
FAST AND FRESH GROCERS LTD
Company number 11939968

and from API (endpoint for Company Detail) - you get this;

There is an extra (or double) space in the API response (between ‘FRESH’ & ‘GROCERS’)

It only appears to happen on a very small number of responses, that I have noticed
Is this a known issue or can anyone add to this question?

[voracityemail]

Obviously I’m not Companies House so cannot speak to:
(a) the “correct” name and
(b) allowing companies to register names with variable amounts of whitespace between words

BUT I suspect what is happening here is:

• Companies House have allowed this company to register with two spaces in the name - possibly not intentionally e.g. by double-pressing space in a document / via an online submission.

• This is correctly reported in data e.g. via the API, however in web pages attention is not often paid to whitespace and - by specification - multiple spaces in the HTML will be rendered as a single space.

This appears to be the case as by viewing the page source e.g. in the search for this name - you can see there are indeed two spaces (I’ve highlighted this):

I know that Companies House does have some specific rules on company names. Of course if I ruled the world I’d be tempted to add some ones about canonicalisation of these e.g. obtaining a single representation for matching purposes (I hope they do this themselves internally but it would be helpful for consideration to be given to external users of their data - possibly even those in other branches of government etc.). (In some schemes there can be are several ways of representing “identical” text - and even extremely similar-looking text and the latter can cause trouble!) and whitespace (e.g. you can only have one horizontal space - and not other whitespace characters - between words)…

[frank]

Our view is that there is an embedded gremlin at work here and that double spaces should nor form part of the name.

Each day generally produces a few (say, six or seven tops) new registrations with names that contain one or more double spaces. We strip them out before the incoming data is processed to our database unless there is clear evidence to the contrary within the incorporation images.

https://statbooks.co.uk/Companies/

[mh.hunt]

Thanks everyone – appreciate your replies.

I picked up on the point Frank makes with the incorporation image and for this company, with the aid of some OCR on the pdf image, there is only one space, at all points, in this company name.

How then can Companies House hold the name with two spaces, as detailed?
I think the embedded gremlin thought may have some merit here.

Perhaps the Admin’s can join in with the actual rules/theories or issues at play here.

[voracityemail]

This one was an “electronic filing” e.g. online - IN01(ef). So I imagine that system (or its interface - again this could be user error plus failure to filter these out…) would be the place for them to start.

This has been raised here before it seems - although extra spaces by “limited” or “ltd” may have been fixed:

Names with double spaces

I have noticed that the API returns some company names with double spaces " " in their names. This causes problems with alphabetic sorting, for example, “Alpha Zoo” appears before “Alpha Aardvark” because the extra space ranks ahead of the letter “A”. Were they registered that way, or is this a rendering error? I searched our data collected from the API and found 25,825 companies whose names contain at least one double-space. I suggest that you do a global search and replace double-space wit…

Multiple spaces between words in names

We’ve found that some names have more than one space between words. The data entry system shouldn’t allow this in the first place. Please can CH remove the double spaces? A simple procedure would search and replace with and repeat until no more matches are found. Then fix the data entry software to do the same with inputs. Example:

The example here was in e.g. officer names - but possibly part of the same general principle?

Some names have spaces surrounding hyphen

The system allows names with a space either side of a hyphen, causing multiple identities for the same person, even at the same company with the same year and month of birth. I propose that these names should be disallowed on input. Example: Petru-Calin LUHA, also known as Petru - Calin LUHA:

Possibly separate bug limited to “limited” / “ltd”:

Double spaces before LIMITED or LTD when using search

When using the search endpoint, the title field sometimes has a double space before the final “LIMITED” or “LTD”. This isn’t in the company name in company profile. Is this a bug around adding terminal “LTD” / “LIMITED” designations? Example - note the double space in the title returned: curl -u%APIKEY%: “https://api.companieshouse.gov.uk/search/companies?q=07581392&items_per_page=2” { "kind": "search#companies", "items_per_page": 2, "start_index": 0, "items": [ { …

…which may have been fixed:

Double spacing in company name results before LTD section

When making a call to the lookup service our automated tests have started to fail. Upon investigation the reuslts in business name now has double spacing. Example below. In the business name string we are seeing a double space before the company type i.e. Limited. This appears to be a bug or a change please could we get confirmation? Thanks “request”: { “businessName”: “MARKS ABOVE LIMITED”, “city”: “London”, “postcode”: “WC2H 9JQ”, “street”: “Shelton Street”, “businessRegNumber”: “1199…

[mh.hunt]

Thanks @voracityemail for your update - appears a varied and perhaps an ongoing issue for CHS

I did, in the end, a work-around on the import code I use for this issue.

Kind regards.