From: Alex LeDonne <aledonne.listmail@...>
Date: 2007-06-26T02:31:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Regexp to split name?

On 6/25/07, Dan Stevens (IAmAI) <dan.stevens.iamai@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 25/06/07, Alex Young <alex@blackkettle.org> wrote:
> > Names are just *hard* - the only reliable way of handling them that I've
> > found is to let users control it themselves...
>
> Agreed. My example makes very simple assumptions that I'd imagine
> apply to the vast majority of names. However, in many computer
> problems there are obscure exceptions that either break the program or
> break things for the user.

I worked at an institution that was forced to rewrite a bunch of
name-related code for a legacy system because of a "sanity" check that
was just plain wrong... and nobody realized it until Dr. O came to
work. Now they had to allow one-letter surnames, too (they'd already
allowed one-letter given or middle names, thanks to President Truman's
middle name, S).

Almost any assumption you make about name parsing will be wrong. For
example, take the assumption that names are composed only of letters
and letter-like symbols.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_3._Hoffman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_personal_names_that_contain_numbers

-Alex