Can't export a name that is literally "Null"

A contact whose last name is Null (not the value, but literally N-u-l-l) will, when exported, show up with the Last Name data field blank.

According to the 1990 US Census, only .003 percent of Americans have the last name of Null (ranking #4509 on the list of last name frequency), but it's common enough that if you were to exclude last names that appeared less frequently, you'd be excluding 38% of the American population.

Plus we've got a Null in our database.

This problem has been replicated on the demo by exporting contacts from a Null Group that was created.

The way CiviCRM handles the Null name seems to extend to other data fields; a Null in the City data field was also exported as blank. (Not that there are any cities or towns named Null, but just to illustrate...)

Thanks.

Lobo replied (on the Forums):

please file an issue for this. We'll attempt to fix this in the 2.1 release (since it only happens for 0.003 % of the names). the string 'null' is being used by the base package that we use (DB_DataObject) in a special manner (i.e. make the field null) and hence the fix is not as trivial as it sounds