Great examples! ++

In the midst of a contractual dispute with Warner Bros. in 1993, he changed his stage name to the unpronounceable love symbol and was often referred to as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (or TAFKAP)

-- from The late (mindbogglingly brilliant) musician Prince (wikipedia)

I find this stuff very entertaining for some reason. I remember being amused in the extreme by Prince's new unpronounceable name.

Since I don't have a list of references on this topic yet, I'll remedy that oversight here so as not to disappoint the LanX. :) Further suggestions welcome!

References on Parsing Names and Addresses

Parsing names:

• Split first and last names by Bod (2022) - lots of useful replies on the difficulties of parsing human names
• Re^7: regex to return line with name but not if it has a number by afoken (2017) - examples of names that do not match the simple Firstname Lastname scheme
• Capture Groups by Bod (2023)

• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names - essay by Patrick McKenzie
• Names of Sun Yat-sen (wikipedia)

• RegExp, grabbing first name by anonymonk (2016)
• regex to return line with name but not if it has a number by anonymonk (2017)

Related:

• Re^2: Procedural vs OOP modules by Bod (2021) - discusses various Lingua modules to help enforce consistent writing styles (I replied)

Address de-duplication:

• De Duping Street Addresses Fuzzily by patrickrock (2005) - my reply
• Efficient Fuzzy Matching Of An Address by Limbic~Region (2008) - my reply ... still have nightmares about Captain Cook Cruises ;)

CPAN

• Perl5 Registered Module List: Section 11 "String Processing, Language Text Processing, Parsing and Searching"
• Lingua::EN::NameParse by Kim Ryan
• Lingua::EN::AddressParse by Kim Ryan

Note: this node was updated with new references long after originally written.