I have names all composed of ascii characters, that I need to uniformize:

I came with the code below that seems to work (as far as I can test it).

My questions: how could I improved it ? (I think it will break if with unicode characters, what changes should I made to get it work with any character set ?)

Thanks

François

use strict;
use warnings;

while ( my $t = <DATA> ) {
    chomp $t;
    printf "orig: %-30s translated: %s\n", $t, translate($t);

}

sub translate {
    my $str = shift;
    $str =~ tr/-/ /;           #replace - with a space
    $str =~ tr/a-zA-Z/ /cs;    #replace non letter with a space
    my @words = split( /\s+/, $str );
    foreach my $w (@words) {

        #insert a space when a upper case is inside a word
        if ( $w =~ /\p{isLower}\p{isUpper}/ ) {
            my @all;
            while ( $w =~ m/\G(\p{isUpper}*\p{isLower}+)/g ) {
                push @all, $1;
            }
            $w = join( " ", @all );
        }
        else {

            $w = ucfirst( lc($w) ); # we are using side effect of fore
+ach loop
        }
    }
    return join( ' ', @words );
}
__DATA__
Acierno James S., Jr.
Acierno James, Jr.
Ackermann-Hirschi L.
Agatonovic-Jovini T.
Alba-Castro Jose-Luis
Alconada Verzini M. J.
AlconadaVerzini M. J.
Alvarez Fernandez A.
Alvarez-Bolado Gonzalo
Alvarez-Gonzalez B.
AlvarezGonzalez B.
AlvarezPiqueras D
Amor Dos Santos S. P.
Amor DosSantos S. P.
AmorDosSantos S. P
da Costa F. Barreiro Guimaraes
Dano Hoffmann M.
DanoHoffmann M.
Dell' Acqua A.
Dell' Asta L.
Dell'Acqua A.
Dell'Asta L.
Dell'Omo Giacomo
della Volp D.
della Volpe D.
Della Volpe D.
DeRegie J. B. De Vivie
Derendarz D.
deRenstrom P. A. Bruckman
Dupl'akova Nikoleta
Duplakova Nikoleta
Faucci Giannelli M.
Fauccigiannelli M.
FaucciGiannelli M.
Yusuff I.
Yusuff' I.
Yao W-M
Yao W-M.
Yao W. -M
Yao W. -M.

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In reply to regex: help for improvement by frazap

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