What data is automatically upper cased at Companies House?

1

Hi guys,

Question: What information is automatically converted to uppercase when it is submitted to companies house?

Company name appears to be uppercased e.g. the FormSubmission schemas (e.g. FormSubmission-v2-9.xsd) say for the “CompanyName” element that “The content of the CompanyName element will be converted to upper case on receipt at Companies House for Incorporation submissions”.

However - is any other data automatically upper cased at Companies House?
e.g. if we look at beta.companieshouse.gov.uk (and search for any company) or look at data from a “company data request” it seems “peoples surnames” are also in uppercase?

Question: Is this a general rule - people surnames are always upper cased?

The reason for the inquiry is “lower case” accented characters are not accepted by Companies House and will fail with a schema validation error e.g.

Invalid XML: Datatype error: Type:InvalidDatatypeValueException, Message:Value ‘Cróómbs Róád’ does not match regular expression facet ‘[-,.:; 0-9A-Z&@$£¥€’"«»‘’“”?!/\(){}<>*=#%+ÀÁÂÃÄÅĀĂĄÆǼÇĆĈĊČÞĎÐÈÉÊËĒĔĖĘĚĜĞĠĢĤĦÌÍÎÏĨĪĬĮİĴĶĹĻĽĿŁÑŃŅŇŊÒÓÔÕÖØŌŎŐǾŒŔŖŘŚŜŞŠŢŤŦÙÚÛÜŨŪŬŮŰŲŴẀẂẄỲÝŶŸŹŻŽa-zÀÖØſƒǺǿẀẅỲỳ]

We are thinking of therefore always uppercasing Company Names before submission to CoHo but I would like to be sure that peoples SURNAMES are also ALWAYS uppercased before we always uppercase people surnames as well.

If there are no other places where characters are automatically uppercased (e.g. addresses etc.) we will have to cater for these separately before submission.

Many thanks,

Alex.

2

Good morning Alex,

Companies House always output data in capital letters - data received in lower case (where allowed) will be converted internally.

The only exception where it is output in lower case is on the GOV.UK BETA Companies House service where the data returned has to be consistent with the Govemment standard.

I hope this helps.

SDN

3

Thanks Simon,

That’s interesting.

I am still a little undecided though what to do (at our end before submission) with company names and peoples surnames - we can uppercase them (to preserve the accented characters - if any) and on all other “lower case” data simply map any accented characters to a non-accented equivalent.

My hesitation over upper-casing company names and people’s surnames before submission is whether our clients will suddenly object to seeing these names in uppercase on our forms.

Something for us to decide on though.

Much obliged,

Alex.

4

Hi Simon,

Does Companies House have any plans to open their electronic filing schema validation to accept the lower-case versions of those upper-case special characters that are currently accepted for strings in the Incorporation & related schemas?

Many thanks,
PJ

5

Unfortunately not PJ.

Its possible that this may be addressed when we introduce our Restful JSON API fIling platform though (which will in due course replace our XML interface).

SDN