Hi herveus,

++ on the point that there is no general solution to this problem but I thought I would just check out how Lingua::EN::NameCase would deal with your examples...

#perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
use Lingua::EN::NameCase qw( NameCase nc ) ;

my @proper_names = (
    'Owen ap Tudor', 
    'Sveinn inn Danska',
    'David ben Jesse'
);

my @lowercase_names = map { lc } @proper_names ;

my @result = NameCase( @lowercase_names ) ;

my ($iCount, $bMatch);

for ($iCount = 0; $iCount <= $#result; $iCount++) {
    $bMatch = $proper_names[$iCount] eq $result[$iCount] ? 'Y' : 'N';
    write;
}

exit;

format STDOUT_TOP =
Orignal case                    Output from NameCase            Match
==============================  ==============================  =====
.

format STDOUT =
@<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<  @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<  @<<<<
$proper_names[$iCount],         $result[$iCount],             $bMatch
.

__END__
[download]

Surprisingly the output looks like this:

Orignal case                    Output from NameCase            Match
==============================  ==============================  =====
Owen ap Tudor                   Owen ap Tudor                   Y
Sveinn inn Danska               Sveinn Inn Danska               N
David ben Jesse                 David ben Jesse                 Y
[download]

"Sveinn Inn Danska" is not correct but surprisingly for a Lingua::EN module it does deal well with the other cases. Also from the documentation there is a variable that can be set to deal with special cases for Spanish... Perhaps the module itself has evolved to become a misnomer.

Regards,
Dom.

Update: Corrected typo on link.
Update: Corrected typo on incorrect name.