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mdasenlast Thursday at 4:07 PM1 replyview on HN

I'm imagining someone driving in England and the police having no way to input those letters into their system.

I wonder if the Danish system would prevent ÆØÅ and AEOA from both being registered. Would the Danish system Match "ÆØÅ" if someone input "AEOA"? There are unicode normalization rules, but I wonder if systems would be built to handle that. If you're Danish, you'd just use those letters so it wouldn't be a useful feature. If you're English, you wouldn't often encounter those letters so it wouldn't be a useful feature.


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alexfoolast Thursday at 4:28 PM

> I'm imagining someone driving in England and the police having no way to input those letters into their system.

I would assume the UK has worked out a way of dealing with this having had plenty of years of foreign plates being driven around the country.

Any Danish license plate driven in the UK will almost certainly have to a be an EU style plate with the blue band on the left with the "DK" country code. If someone needs to send a fine to the registered owner of this plate I'd guess they'd be handing over the camera footage/images to a contact in the relevant country and letting them confirm what the exact plate is.

(There may be some weird exemptions for old classic/vintage cars that can continue to be driven on their original number plates, in which case you really don't know who to contact.)

The UK is very strict on license plates. I don't think there's any valid reason for driving a car without some form of a license plate on display (cars being driven on trade plates placed in the front/rear windscreens are the closest thing I can think of). I'd expect the UK Police to pull over any car that didn't have plates on it if they spotted it. It's certainly considered very suspicious in the UK if a car is missing either of its plates.

There are plenty of examples of normal ANPR cameras failing to capture plates properly. Or even sillier examples like this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-58959930

This story got referenced by the associated Government body here: https://videosurveillance.blog.gov.uk/2021/10/27/the-camera-...

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