Re: Splitting/joining on different characters

You do realize that McDarren, brian_d_foy, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the folks from O'Reilly will be stopping by to talk with you about your mistaken assumptions about how names are capitalized?

I understand that it may not matter for your particular data set, but it's worth keeping in mind if the results might get back to the user. People get touchy about their names ...

The intelligent reader will judge for himself. Without examining the facts fully and fairly, there is no way of knowing whether vox populi is really vox dei, or merely vox asinorum. — Cyrus H. Gordon

Comment on Re: Splitting/joining on different characters

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Re^2: Splitting/joining on different characters by swampyankee (Parson) on May 25, 2006 at 19:22 UTC
Names can be very tricky (as in impossibly so) to parse to everyone's satisfaction with a clean set of rules. A few examples: Simon Conway Morris: "Conway Morris" is his surname. Ludwig van Beethoven: the "van" is not capitalized (but, course, the Van in Van Morrison is). Similarly, the "da" in da Vinci is not capitalized. Of course, the big company you work for doesn't care, until the CEO (with a name like Gerard 't Hooft) gets all annoyed that his name keeps getting turned into Gerard Thooft. Added some quotes around Conway Morris and corrected some spelling (or at least miscorrected it in a better looking way ) emc "Being forced to write comments actually improves code, because it is easier to fix a crock than to explain it. " —G. Steele	[reply]
Re^3: Splitting/joining on different characters by SirBones (Friar) on May 25, 2006 at 19:36 UTC
Well, fortunately my CEO isn't likely to be on this list (it's a list of coders who have access to a group of servers), but you've got me thinking. Perhaps I should just punt with `$name = uc($name);` [download] That will annoy everyone, although not equally. ;-) "This bounty hunter is my kind of scum: Fearless and inventive." --J.T. Hutt	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Splitting/joining on different characters by SirBones (Friar) on May 25, 2006 at 19:02 UTC
People get touchy about their names ... It's a good point, but I work for a BIG COMPANY and they spell our names any way they like. :-) But well taken; I think I need to have a couple of conversations about that. Ken "This bounty hunter is my kind of scum: Fearless and inventive." --J.T. Hutt	[reply]
Re^3: Splitting/joining on different characters by bpphillips (Friar) on May 25, 2006 at 19:37 UTC
You might find Lingua::EN::NameCase useful. It includes support for quite a few of the special rules for name capitalization. A quick search on the code seems to indicate it wouldn't handle 'brian d foy' correctly though! --Brian	[reply]