“last name, first name” -> “first name last name” in serialized strings

Question

I have a bunch of strings that contain lists of names in last name, first name format, separated by commas, like so:

names <- c(\'Beaufoy         


        

Answer 1

If you can be certain that a comma isn't going to be in a person's name, this might work:

mynames <- c('Beaufoy, Simon, Boyle, Danny',
             'Nolan, Christopher',
             'Blumberg, Stuart, Cholodenko, Lisa',
             'Seidler, David',
             'Sorkin, Aaron',
             'Hoover, J. Edgar')
mynames2 <- strsplit(mynames, ", ")

unlist(lapply(mynames2, 
              function(x) paste(x[1:length(x) %% 2 == 0], 
                                x[1:length(x) %% 2 != 0])))
# [1] "Simon Beaufoy"     "Danny Boyle"       "Christopher Nolan"
# [4] "Stuart Blumberg"   "Lisa Cholodenko"   "David Seidler"    
# [7] "Aaron Sorkin"      "J. Edgar Hoover"        

I've added J. Edgar Hoover in there for good measure.

If you want the names that were quoted together to stay together, add collapse = ", " to your paste() function:

unlist(lapply(mynames2, 
              function(x) paste(x[1:length(x) %% 2 == 0], 
                                x[1:length(x) %% 2 != 0],
                                collapse = ", ")))
# [1] "Simon Beaufoy, Danny Boyle"       "Christopher Nolan"               
# [3] "Stuart Blumberg, Lisa Cholodenko" "David Seidler"                   
# [5] "Aaron Sorkin"                     "J. Edgar Hoover"