The "ruby way" to break apart a name?

ruby-talk
1

Switching from C# to Ruby, and learning to write "the Ruby way"... is
there a better way to get the first and last names from a string?

Assume for simplicity that the the first name is the text up to the
first space, and the last name is the text after the last space.

def split_name(fullname)
  parts = fullname.split(' ')
  [parts.first, parts.last]
end

This returns me an array so I can do this:

first, last = split_name("Donald P. Q. Duck")

first => "Donald"
last => "Duck"

(man, I love Ruby).

But something about split_name still feels a bit "wrong", like there's a
more succint Ruby way to return the first and last elements of the
split() results.

Thanks
Jeff

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

2

Switching from C# to Ruby, and learning to write "the Ruby way"... is
there a better way to get the first and last names from a string?

Assume for simplicity that the the first name is the text up to the
first space, and the last name is the text after the last space.

def split_name(fullname)
        parts = fullname.split(' ')
        [parts.first, parts.last]
end

This returns me an array so I can do this:

first, last = split_name("Donald P. Q. Duck")

first => "Donald"
last => "Duck"

(man, I love Ruby).

But something about split_name still feels a bit "wrong", like there's a
more succint Ruby way to return the first and last elements of the
split() results.

Perhaps:
  "Donald P. Q. Duck".split.values_at(0,-1)
    ==>["Donald", "Duck"]

... where 0 and -1 are array indices.

cheers,
Mark

···

On 12/20/05, Jeff Cohen <cohen.jeff@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks
Jeff

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

3

Hi,

At Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:57:01 +0900,
Jeff Cohen wrote in [ruby-talk:171830]:

Assume for simplicity that the the first name is the text up to the
first space, and the last name is the text after the last space.

What should be returned if fullname has no space?

  def split_name(fullname)
    fullname.scan(/(\S+).*\s(\S+)/).first
  end

···

--
Nobu Nakada

4

Jeff Cohen wrote...

Switching from C# to Ruby, and learning to write "the Ruby way"... is
there a better way to get the first and last names from a string?

Assume for simplicity that the the first name is the text up to the
first space, and the last name is the text after the last space.

def split_name(fullname)
parts = fullname.split(' ')
[parts.first, parts.last]
end

...

But something about split_name still feels a bit "wrong", like there's a
more succint Ruby way to return the first and last elements of the
split() results.

class String
  def split_name
    split.values_at(0, -1)
  end
end

Cheers,
Dave

5

In Ruby you can open up any class and modify/extend it at any time. Even the
built in ones. So you could do:

  class String
    def name_parts(pattern = ' ', limit = 2)
      split(pattern, limit)
    end
  end

  'Marcel Molina Jr.'.name_parts
  => ["Marcel", "Molina Jr."]

marcel

···

On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 10:57:01AM +0900, Jeff Cohen wrote:

Switching from C# to Ruby, and learning to write "the Ruby way"... is
there a better way to get the first and last names from a string?

Assume for simplicity that the the first name is the text up to the
first space, and the last name is the text after the last space.

def split_name(fullname)
  parts = fullname.split(' ')
  [parts.first, parts.last]
end

This returns me an array so I can do this:

first, last = split_name("Donald P. Q. Duck")

first => "Donald"
last => "Duck"

(man, I love Ruby).

But something about split_name still feels a bit "wrong", like there's a
more succint Ruby way to return the first and last elements of the
split() results.

--
Marcel Molina Jr. <marcel@vernix.org>

6

Jeff Cohen wrote:

Assume for simplicity that the the first name is the text up to the first space, and the last name is the text after the last space.

[...]

But something about split_name still feels a bit "wrong",

Well, I think the bigger issue is that your assumptions are wrong. :slight_smile:

In some countries, the surname is written first, then the 'first' name. Japan is an example. Some Japanese write their names in reverse when writing them transliterated to English, and some don't. (...which makes me wonder which is the case for Matz...)

Also, the number of words in the full name can vary between 1 and a fairly large integer. (I knew a guy with 6.) The number of name words required to actually route mail to a unique person can vary between 1 and (at least) 3, and compound names are not always hyphenated. Then there are things like "Jr", and salutations that go after the name rather than in front.

There are quite a few postings in comp.risks about this kind of thing. In general it's very hard to do it right, and if (for example) you want to produce a "Dear <salutation goes here>" header for a letter, it's best to store the salutation as a separate field, rather than try to guess what it might be from the name.

Of course, if you're working with a badly structured database someone else has given you, you may not have the choice...

mathew

···

--
      <URL:http://www.pobox.com/~meta/&gt;
My parents went to the lost kingdom of Hyrule
     and all I got was this lousy triforce.

7

In Ruby you can open up any class and modify/extend it at any time. Even the
built in ones. So you could do:

Well, you cant after String.freeze :slight_smile:

8

Amen. Names are much trickier than you think...

James Edward Gray II (married to Dana Ann Leslie Gray)

···

On Dec 21, 2005, at 4:17 PM, mathew wrote:

Also, the number of words in the full name can vary between 1 and a fairly large integer.

9

We had a similar problem at work.

In the Spanish speaking world we use two last names: one from the
father's family (apellido paterno) and another from the mother's
family (apellido materno). For the "first name" there's no limit in
the number of names.

Fortunately for us, the names were stored in the database as:

<apellido paterno> <apellido materno> <nombres>

But there was a difficulty. In Spanish we have last names composed of
more than one word like "de la Vega", "y Cruz", "de las Casas"

Examples:

Cruz y Cruz María del Rosario
de la Vega Domínguez Jorge
Ponce de León Ernesto Zedillo

We couldn't avoid regular expressions:

···

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: mathew <meta@pobox.com>
Date: 21-dic-2005 16:17
Subject: Re: The "ruby way" to break apart a name?
To: ruby-talk ML <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>

Jeff Cohen wrote:

Assume for simplicity that the the first name is the text up to the
first space, and the last name is the text after the last space.

[...]

But something about split_name still feels a bit "wrong",

Well, I think the bigger issue is that your assumptions are wrong. :slight_smile:

In some countries, the surname is written first, then the 'first' name.
Japan is an example. Some Japanese write their names in reverse when
writing them transliterated to English, and some don't. (...which makes
me wonder which is the case for Matz...)

Also, the number of words in the full name can vary between 1 and a
fairly large integer. (I knew a guy with 6.) The number of name words
required to actually route mail to a unique person can vary between 1
and (at least) 3, and compound names are not always hyphenated. Then
there are things like "Jr", and salutations that go after the name
rather than in front.

There are quite a few postings in comp.risks about this kind of thing.
In general it's very hard to do it right, and if (for example) you want
to produce a "Dear <salutation goes here>" header for a letter, it's
best to store the salutation as a separate field, rather than try to
guess what it might be from the name.

Of course, if you're working with a badly structured database someone
else has given you, you may not have the choice...

mathew
--
      <URL:http://www.pobox.com/~meta/&gt;
My parents went to the lost kingdom of Hyrule
     and all I got was this lousy triforce.

--
Gerardo Santana
"Between individuals, as between nations, respect for the rights of
others is peace" - Don Benito Juárez

10

Thanks for the help, everyone. All of the suggestions have been
helpful.

Jeff

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

11

Lyndon Samson wrote:

In Ruby you can open up any class and modify/extend it at any time. Even the
built in ones. So you could do:

Well, you cant after String.freeze :slight_smile:

Ha! Maybe you can String = String.dup ! :slight_smile:

E

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

12

James Edward Gray II wrote:

Amen. Names are much trickier than you think...

James Edward Gray II (married to Dana Ann Leslie Gray)

I second that sentiment. I recall a college buddy of mine. His full
name was Bradley Lee Bradley. Trying hard to think of a good regex
representation of that :slight_smile:

13

James Edward Gray II <james@grayproductions.net> writes:

···

On Dec 21, 2005, at 4:17 PM, mathew wrote:

Also, the number of words in the full name can vary between 1 and a
fairly large integer.

Amen. Names are much trickier than you think...

James Edward Gray II (married to Dana Ann Leslie Gray)

Full Ack, James II.

--
Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen@gmail.com> http://chneukirchen.org

14

And then there's...

Louis George Maurice Adolphe Roch Albert Abel Antonio Alexandre Noé
Jean Lucien Daniel Eugène Joseph-le-brun Joseph-Barême Thomas Thomas
Thomas-Thomas Pierre Arbon Pierre-Maurel Barthélemi Artus Alphonse
Bertrand Dieudonné Emanuel Josué Vincent Luc Michel
Jules-de-la-plane Jules-Bazin Julio César Jullie

... a 19th-century musician who had a lot of godfathers, all of whom
he was named after. You gotta love the "Thomas"'s :slight_smile:

(And I'll rattle off that name from memory for a drink.)

Also, don't forget cases like Ralph Vaughan Williams, where the last
name is Vaughan Williams.

David

···

On Thu, 22 Dec 2005, James Edward Gray II wrote:

On Dec 21, 2005, at 4:17 PM, mathew wrote:

Also, the number of words in the full name can vary between 1 and a fairly large integer.

Amen. Names are much trickier than you think...

James Edward Gray II (married to Dana Ann Leslie Gray)

--
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net

"Ruby for Rails", from Manning Publications, coming April 2006!

15

This reminds me of U.S. street addresses. I (on and off) do work that
interfaces with a huge IBM mainframe application. That system has
many, many separate fields for street addresses:
Number, Direction, Street/Route, Quad, Suffix, Apartment, Line2, etc.
I laughed at the way the original engineers had overbuilt. Ha ha ha.
...
...
Then I had to write code that took a single address string and split
it into its component parts, and I stopped laughing.
e.g. 123 N. NESTOR LANE RD. SE #10B

Life is complicated, it turns out.

···

On 1/1/06, Gerardo Santana Gómez Garrido <gerardo.santana@gmail.com> wrote:

We had a similar problem at work.

In the Spanish speaking world we use two last names: one from the
father's family (apellido paterno) and another from the mother's
family (apellido materno). For the "first name" there's no limit in
the number of names.

Fortunately for us, the names were stored in the database as:

<apellido paterno> <apellido materno> <nombres>

But there was a difficulty. In Spanish we have last names composed of
more than one word like "de la Vega", "y Cruz", "de las Casas"

Examples:

Cruz y Cruz María del Rosario
de la Vega Domínguez Jorge
Ponce de León Ernesto Zedillo

We couldn't avoid regular expressions:
Santana's Tech Notes: Matching ISO-8859-1 strings with Ruby

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: mathew <meta@pobox.com>
Date: 21-dic-2005 16:17
Subject: Re: The "ruby way" to break apart a name?
To: ruby-talk ML <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>

Jeff Cohen wrote:
> Assume for simplicity that the the first name is the text up to the
> first space, and the last name is the text after the last space.
[...]
> But something about split_name still feels a bit "wrong",

Well, I think the bigger issue is that your assumptions are wrong. :slight_smile:

In some countries, the surname is written first, then the 'first' name.
Japan is an example. Some Japanese write their names in reverse when
writing them transliterated to English, and some don't. (...which makes
me wonder which is the case for Matz...)

Also, the number of words in the full name can vary between 1 and a
fairly large integer. (I knew a guy with 6.) The number of name words
required to actually route mail to a unique person can vary between 1
and (at least) 3, and compound names are not always hyphenated. Then
there are things like "Jr", and salutations that go after the name
rather than in front.

There are quite a few postings in comp.risks about this kind of thing.
In general it's very hard to do it right, and if (for example) you want
to produce a "Dear <salutation goes here>" header for a letter, it's
best to store the salutation as a separate field, rather than try to
guess what it might be from the name.

Of course, if you're working with a badly structured database someone
else has given you, you may not have the choice...

mathew
--
      <URL:http://www.pobox.com/~meta/&gt;
My parents went to the lost kingdom of Hyrule
     and all I got was this lousy triforce.

--
Gerardo Santana
"Between individuals, as between nations, respect for the rights of
others is peace" - Don Benito Juárez
http://santanatechnotes.blogspot.com/

16

I've always wondered about this, both in Spanish names and American hyphenated
names. When the mother and father have a baby, does it go like this:

baby.apellido_materno = mother.apellido_paterno
baby.apellido_paterno = father.apellido_paterno

Or is it done like this:

baby.apellido_materno = mother.apellido_materno
baby.apellido_paterno = father.apellido_paterno

I KNOW it can't be this:

baby.apellido_materno = mother.apellido_paterno + '-' +mother.apellido_materno
baby.apellido_paterno = father.apellido_paterno + '-' +father.apellido_materno

If the preceding were done, names would become huge and still growing.

SteveT

Steve Litt
http://www.troubleshooters.com
slitt@troubleshooters.com

···

On Sunday 01 January 2006 10:25 pm, Gerardo Santana Gómez Garrido wrote:

We had a similar problem at work.

In the Spanish speaking world we use two last names: one from the
father's family (apellido paterno) and another from the mother's
family (apellido materno). For the "first name" there's no limit in
the number of names.

Fortunately for us, the names were stored in the database as:

<apellido paterno> <apellido materno> <nombres>

17

I thought that was a spoonerism at first and wondered what you had
against James' comments. Then I looked again and read "Full ACK", and
it made more sense. :slight_smile:

Jacob Fugal

···

On 12/22/05, Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen@gmail.com> wrote:

James Edward Gray II <james@grayproductions.net> writes:

> On Dec 21, 2005, at 4:17 PM, mathew wrote:
>
>> Also, the number of words in the full name can vary between 1 and a
>> fairly large integer.
>
> Amen. Names are much trickier than you think...
>
> James Edward Gray II (married to Dana Ann Leslie Gray)

Full Ack, James II.

18

unknown wrote:

Also, the number of words in the full name can vary between 1 and a fairly
large integer.

Amen. Names are much trickier than you think...

HEY YOU GUYS! :slight_smile: I was originally asking for the best way to return
the first and last parts of an array.

Breaking apart a name was just an example because I had to make up and
example in order to ask the question. Hence I said "Assume for
simplicity..." OF COURSE dealing with names is not as trivial as my
example.

The initial replies helped me understand arrays in Ruby better.

Thanks
Jeff

···

On Thu, 22 Dec 2005, James Edward Gray II wrote:

On Dec 21, 2005, at 4:17 PM, mathew wrote:

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

19

Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@gmail.com> writes:

This reminds me of U.S. street addresses. I (on and off) do work that
interfaces with a huge IBM mainframe application. That system has
many, many separate fields for street addresses:
Number, Direction, Street/Route, Quad, Suffix, Apartment, Line2, etc.
I laughed at the way the original engineers had overbuilt. Ha ha ha.
...
...
Then I had to write code that took a single address string and split
it into its component parts, and I stopped laughing.
e.g. 123 N. NESTOR LANE RD. SE #10B

Life is complicated, it turns out.

And what's the point of storing that in different fields?

···

--
Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen@gmail.com> http://chneukirchen.org

20

This reminds me of U.S. street addresses. I (on and off) do work that
interfaces with a huge IBM mainframe application. That system has
many, many separate fields for street addresses:
Number, Direction, Street/Route, Quad, Suffix, Apartment, Line2, etc.
I laughed at the way the original engineers had overbuilt. Ha ha ha.
...
...
Then I had to write code that took a single address string and split
it into its component parts, and I stopped laughing.
e.g. 123 N. NESTOR LANE RD. SE #10B

Life is complicated, it turns out.

That's nothing. Addresses here are based on landmarks:

De donde fue Texaco Viejo 1/2 C al E, 2 c al S
City Name, Department name (sometimes), Nicaragua

Break that one up.

(literal translation is: From where the old texaco USED TO BE (it's a petronic
now), 1/2 a block to the east and 2 blocks to the south) That is just how
addresses are here.

···

On Monday 02 January 2006 01:28, Wilson Bilkovich wrote:

On 1/1/06, Gerardo Santana Gómez Garrido <gerardo.santana@gmail.com> wrote:
> We had a similar problem at work.
>
> In the Spanish speaking world we use two last names: one from the
> father's family (apellido paterno) and another from the mother's
> family (apellido materno). For the "first name" there's no limit in
> the number of names.
>
> Fortunately for us, the names were stored in the database as:
>
> <apellido paterno> <apellido materno> <nombres>
>
> But there was a difficulty. In Spanish we have last names composed of
> more than one word like "de la Vega", "y Cruz", "de las Casas"
>
> Examples:
>
> Cruz y Cruz María del Rosario
> de la Vega Domínguez Jorge
> Ponce de León Ernesto Zedillo
>
> We couldn't avoid regular expressions:
> http://santanatechnotes.blogspot.com/2005/12/matching-iso-8859-1-strings-
>with-ruby.html
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: mathew <meta@pobox.com>
> Date: 21-dic-2005 16:17
> Subject: Re: The "ruby way" to break apart a name?
> To: ruby-talk ML <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
>
> Jeff Cohen wrote:
> > Assume for simplicity that the the first name is the text up to the
> > first space, and the last name is the text after the last space.
>
> [...]
>
> > But something about split_name still feels a bit "wrong",
>
> Well, I think the bigger issue is that your assumptions are wrong. :slight_smile:
>
> In some countries, the surname is written first, then the 'first' name.
> Japan is an example. Some Japanese write their names in reverse when
> writing them transliterated to English, and some don't. (...which makes
> me wonder which is the case for Matz...)
>
> Also, the number of words in the full name can vary between 1 and a
> fairly large integer. (I knew a guy with 6.) The number of name words
> required to actually route mail to a unique person can vary between 1
> and (at least) 3, and compound names are not always hyphenated. Then
> there are things like "Jr", and salutations that go after the name
> rather than in front.
>
> There are quite a few postings in comp.risks about this kind of thing.
> In general it's very hard to do it right, and if (for example) you want
> to produce a "Dear <salutation goes here>" header for a letter, it's
> best to store the salutation as a separate field, rather than try to
> guess what it might be from the name.
>
> Of course, if you're working with a badly structured database someone
> else has given you, you may not have the choice...
>
>
> mathew
> --
> <URL:http://www.pobox.com/~meta/&gt;
> My parents went to the lost kingdom of Hyrule
> and all I got was this lousy triforce.
>
>
>
> --
> Gerardo Santana
> "Between individuals, as between nations, respect for the rights of
> others is peace" - Don Benito Juárez
> http://santanatechnotes.blogspot.com/