From: Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@...>
Date: 2006-01-02T16:28:45+09:00
Subject: Re: The "ruby way" to break apart a name?

This reminds me of U.S. street addresses.  I (on and off) do work that
interfaces with a huge IBM mainframe application. That system has
many, many separate fields for street addresses:
Number, Direction, Street/Route, Quad, Suffix, Apartment, Line2, etc.
I laughed at the way the original engineers had overbuilt. Ha ha ha.
...
...
Then I had to write code that took a single address string and split
it into its component parts, and I stopped laughing.
e.g. 123 N. NESTOR LANE RD. SE #10B

Life is complicated, it turns out.

On 1/1/06, Gerardo Santana G�mez Garrido <gerardo.santana@gmail.com> wrote:
> We had a similar problem at work.
>
> In the Spanish speaking world we use two last names: one from the
> father's family (apellido paterno) and another from the mother's
> family (apellido materno). For the "first name" there's no limit in
> the number of names.
>
> Fortunately for us, the names were stored in the database as:
>
> <apellido paterno> <apellido materno> <nombres>
>
> But there was a difficulty. In Spanish we have last names composed of
> more than one word like "de la Vega", "y Cruz", "de las Casas"
>
> Examples:
>
> Cruz y Cruz Mar�a del Rosario
> de la Vega Dom�nguez Jorge
> Ponce de Le�n Ernesto Zedillo
>
> We couldn't avoid regular expressions:
> http://santanatechnotes.blogspot.com/2005/12/matching-iso-8859-1-strings-with-ruby.html
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: mathew <meta@pobox.com>
> Date: 21-dic-2005 16:17
> Subject: Re: The "ruby way" to break apart a name?
> To: ruby-talk ML <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
>
>
> Jeff Cohen wrote:
> > Assume for simplicity that the the first name is the text up to the
> > first space, and the last name is the text after the last space.
> [...]
> > But something about split_name still feels a bit "wrong",
>
> Well, I think the bigger issue is that your assumptions are wrong. :-)
>
> In some countries, the surname is written first, then the 'first' name.
> Japan is an example. Some Japanese write their names in reverse when
> writing them transliterated to English, and some don't. (...which makes
> me wonder which is the case for Matz...)
>
> Also, the number of words in the full name can vary between 1 and a
> fairly large integer. (I knew a guy with 6.)  The number of name words
> required to actually route mail to a unique person can vary between 1
> and (at least) 3, and compound names are not always hyphenated. Then
> there are things like "Jr", and salutations that go after the name
> rather than in front.
>
> There are quite a few postings in comp.risks about this kind of thing.
> In general it's very hard to do it right, and if (for example) you want
> to produce a "Dear <salutation goes here>" header for a letter, it's
> best to store the salutation as a separate field, rather than try to
> guess what it might be from the name.
>
> Of course, if you're working with a badly structured database someone
> else has given you, you may not have the choice...
>
>
> mathew
> --
>       <URL:http://www.pobox.com/~meta/>
> My parents went to the lost kingdom of Hyrule
>      and all I got was this lousy triforce.
>
>
>
> --
> Gerardo Santana
> "Between individuals, as between nations, respect for the rights of
> others is peace" - Don Benito Ju�rez
> http://santanatechnotes.blogspot.com/
>
>