Human Name parsing

Question

I have a bunch of human names. They are all \"Western\" names and I only need American conventions/abbreviations (e.g., Mr. instead of Sr. for señor). Unfortunately, the pe

Answer 1

Have you tried the Ruby gem Namae?

It should deal with most western names well and comes with a couple of configuration options for tricky scenarios (multiple last names, comma used both to separate names in a list and name parts). Having said that, it's a deterministic parser (using this grammar) and there are some cases it won't cover.

Here is your example:

require('namae')

Namae.parse 'John Smith and John Smith, Jr. and John Smith Jr and John Smith XIV'
#=> [
  #,
  #,
  #,
  #
]

It struggles with the doctor's title, but that's something we might be able to fix.