Parsing name

  • Thread starter Thread starter Song
  • Start date Start date
S

Song

How to extract LastName, FirstName, MI? (Not all with MI). Sample
names:

John Doe
John M Doe

Thanks
 
Unfortunately, there's no simple answer. Sometimes the first name is two
parts and sometimes the last name is (Mary Lou Retton, Ludwig von
Beethoven). Sometimes there's only a first name. (Pele, Cher)

Realistically, you're likely going to USB (use someone's brain)
 
How to extract LastName, FirstName, MI? (Not all with MI).
Click to expand...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168799

Caveat: Every known way to parse a string into names is error prone.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...parse-a-persons-name-into-its-component-parts

There are two basic problems:

1) You cannot rely on order. You have always a cause for distrust on
user input.

2) There are weird names out there in the wild. Especially there are
surnames consisting of two or more words only separated by spaces.

So in short: It's a NP-hard task... okay not really, you only need a
really large rainbow table with approximately 6 billion names. With
reduction it will be smaller than that but still large enough ;)


mfG
--> stefan <--
 
As pointed out by others, not a simple task. And I'll add folks who add ",
Jr.", ", Senior", and ", III" to their names.

You can try using Left(), Right(), Mid(), and Instr() functions to start
with, then perform a final validation using someone's brain.

Good luck!

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Access MVP

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Any code or pseudocode included in this post is offered "as is", with no
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