A lot of contact management programs do this – you type in a name (e.g., ‘John W. Smith’) and it automatically breaks it up internally into:
First name: John
Middle name: W.
Last name: Smith
Likewise, it figures out things like ‘Mrs. Jane W. Smith’ and ‘Dr. John Doe, Jr.’ correctly as well (assuming you allow for fields like ‘prefix’ and ‘suffix’ in names).
I assume this is a fairly common things that people would want to do… so the question is… how would you do it? Is there a simple algorithm for this? Maybe a regular expression?
I’m after a .NET solution, but I’m not picky.
Update: I appreciate that there is no simple solution for this that covers ALL edge cases and cultures… but let’s say for the sake of argument that you need the name in pieces (filling out forms – as in, say, tax or other government forms – is one case where you are bound to enter the name into fixed fields, whether you like it or not), but you don’t necessarily want to force the user to enter their name into discrete fields (less typing = easier for novice users).
You’d want to have the program ‘guess’ (as best it can) on what’s first, middle, last, etc. If you can, look at how Microsoft Outlook does this for contacts – it lets you type in the name, but if you need to clarify, there’s an extra little window you can open. I’d do the same thing – give the user the window in case they want to enter the name in discrete pieces – but allow for entering the name in one box and doing a ‘best guess’ that covers most common names.
There is no simple solution for this. Name construction varies from culture to culture, and even in the English-speaking world there’s prefixes and suffixes that aren’t necessarily part of the name.
A basic approach is to look for honorifics at the beginning of the string (e.g., ‘Hon. John Doe’) and numbers or some other strings at the end (e.g., ‘John Doe IV’, ‘John Doe Jr.’), but really all you can do is apply a set of heuristics and hope for the best.
It might be useful to find a list of unprocessed names and test your algorithm against it. I don’t know that there’s anything prepackaged out there, though.