Credit Card validation: can Card Name contain non-ASCII characters?

Question

Can the Card Name (i.e. the cardholder name, not the card type) contain non-ASCII characters? Example: \"JOSÉ GONZÁLEZ\".

Answer 1

The character set that is used does not allow for diacritics. In brief, it only allows uppercase ASCII characters.

The restriction ultimately comes from the historical way in which banking cards encode data onto the magnetic stripe (as defined in ISO 7811). The data is encoded in a 7 bits per character format known as ITU-T.50

The cardholder name is encoded with up to 26 characters, each within the range from hex 20-5F. You can see the table for this here: http://www.zytrax.com/tech/ia5.html