Question

Is there a standard or simple way to guess a name from an email address, similar to what gmail does?

For example, “[e-mail]” should give “John Smith”.

Doing this shouldn’t be too hard (strip domain name, remove special characters, capitalize, etc), but I’m sure there should be existing code for this.

Code in Ruby would be preferred, but any other language would be fine.

Answer 1

def email_to_name(email)
  name = email[/[^@]+/]
  name.split(".").map {|n| n.capitalize }.join(" ")
end

p email_to_name("[e-mail]")
# => "John Smith"

This is such a simple task that I doubt you’ll find any “existing code” doing this.