Question

I have an application that reads XML information about a vehicle title and parses it into my application. In my database, I always store my names according to whether it is an individual’s name or a company’s name(because that can occur in my system). The trouble is that the XML source has name data, but it does not specify if it is an individual or a company. I need to know so I can store it appropriately in my database. Is there a database of names or a regular expression or a library that could check the string to see if it matches an individual’s name? Thanks!

Answer 1

You are going to be hard-pressed to find one. Individual names, in particular, are often limited only by imagination. However, if you need one, may I suggest gathering a list of all car manufacturers that your application cares about, and check the XML name data against this list; if a match is found, obviously the name is a company, and if not, you can assume the name is an individual.