Initials can be quite important when comparing two names in order to determine whether they are the same or not. I have added a property to HumanName called initials which holds the first letters of the first name and the middle names. The list-version of the property is a list of single characters. The string-version is build from the list and has a dot and space after each character.

Some examples:

>>> HumanName("John Doe")
<HumanName : [
	title: '' 
	initials: 'J.' 
	first: 'John' 
	middle: '' 
	last: 'Doe' 
	suffix: ''
	nickname: ''
]>
>>> HumanName("Dr. Juan Q. Xavier Velasquez y Garcia")
<HumanName : [
	title: 'Dr.' 
	initials: 'J. Q. X.' 
	first: 'Juan' 
	middle: 'Q. Xavier' 
	last: 'Velasquez y Garcia' 
	suffix: ''
	nickname: ''
]>
>>> HumanName("Doe, John Boris D.")
<HumanName : [
	title: '' 
	initials: 'J. B. D.' 
	first: 'John' 
	middle: 'Boris D.' 
	last: 'Doe' 
	suffix: ''
	nickname: ''
]>
>>> HumanName("Doe, John Boris D.").initials
'J. B. D.'
>>> HumanName("Doe, John Boris D.").initials_list
['J', 'B', 'D']

Since the property is derived from the first and middle names, it will not be counted in the len function nor will it be displayed in the str function.

Each time the first or middle names are updated using the setter, the initials are updated as well. The initial creation of the initials is executed in the post_process phase.

I have added tests and updated the documentation where needed.

I hope this pull request is in line with the quality requirements and vision of the library. The changes should be backwards compatible, but please let me know if I have missed anything!

Love this library - very useful.

However, I've noticed that parsing names in the format Prefix Lastname (e.g. Mr Magoo) parse with a blank name.last and the last name in the first name position (e.g. name.first == Magoo, name.last == ''). I think this should be the other way round!

I may have time to fix this in your code later, but for now i'm using the following kludge to make it work in my code...

if name.title != '': if name.last == '': name.last = name.first name.first = ''

First of all, congrats for the great project.

I have found a small issue related to Portuguese names. By running the following code:

from nameparser import HumanName
name = HumanName('joao da silva do amaral de souza')
name.capitalize()
str(name)

I get the following result:

'Joao da Silva Do Amaral de Souza'

when it should be:

'Joao da Silva do Amaral de Souza'

The d from do should be lowercase.

Hey,

is there an option to get None instead of an empty string for the components? E.g.

>>> name = HumanName("1 & 2, 3 4 5, Mr.")
>>> name.title
None
>>>name.first
'3'

If a name contains two joiner words one after another, s.a. "John of the Doe", get: HumanName:ERROR:parser.py:Couldn't find 'The' in pieces. error.

Just noticed that if I parse "Grand Rounds", it returns:

>>> name
<HumanName : [
	title: 'Grand' 
	first: '' 
	middle: '' 
	last: 'Rounds' 
	suffix: ''
	nickname: ''
]>

Kinda odd no?

Sister Souljah -- "Sister" is more of a title than last name. His Holiness the Dalai Lama -- "His Holiness" -- the two words together is the title. Bob Jones, composer
Bob Jones, author Bob Jones, compositeur -- (French for composer)

Here's the code I used:

        name = HumanName('Sister Souljah')
        library_sort_name = u' '.join([name.first, name.middle, name.suffix, name.nickname, name.title])
        if name.last:
            library_sort_name = u''.join([name.last, ", ", library_sort_name])
        print "library_sort_name=%s" % library_sort_name
        
        name = HumanName('His Holiness the Dalai Lama')
        library_sort_name = u' '.join([name.first, name.middle, name.suffix, name.nickname, name.title])
        if name.last:
            library_sort_name = u''.join([name.last, ", ", library_sort_name])
        print "library_sort_name=%s" % library_sort_name
        
        name = HumanName('Bob Jones, author')
        library_sort_name = u' '.join([name.first, name.middle, name.suffix, name.nickname, name.title])
        if name.last:
            library_sort_name = u''.join([name.last, ", ", library_sort_name])
        print "library_sort_name=%s" % library_sort_name
        
        name = HumanName('Bob Jones, compositeur')
        library_sort_name = u' '.join([name.first, name.middle, name.suffix, name.nickname, name.title])
        if name.last:
            library_sort_name = u''.join([name.last, ", ", library_sort_name])
        print "library_sort_name=%s" % library_sort_name

>>> from nameparser import HumanName
... HumanName('Van Nguyen')
0: <HumanName : [
    title: '' 
    first: 'Van Nguyen' 
    middle: '' 
    last: '' 
    suffix: ''
    nickname: ''
]>
>>> import nameparser
>>> nameparser.VERSION
1: (0, 3, 3)
>>>

name = nameparser.HumanName("鈴木太郎")

name Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 36-39: ordinal not in range(128)

Also: the concept of "last name" and "first name" isn't valid for Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK) names.

Hey -

First off, awesome package. I've been working with a dataset of ~3000 judges and associated titles, and noticed nameparser doesn't pick most (well, any) of them up. Below is the filtered list with at least a few examples/variations on each. I'm happy to do the changes if you'd like. Let me know.

common

Magistrate Judge John F. Forster, Jr Magistrate Judge Joaquin V.E. Manibusan, Jr Magistrate-Judge Elizabeth Todd Campbell Mag-Judge Harwell G Davis, III Mag. Judge Byron G. Cudmore Chief Judge J. Leon Holmes Chief Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn Judge James M. Moody Judge G. Thomas Eisele Judge Callie V. S. Granade Judge C Lynwood Smith, Jr Senior Judge Charles R. Butler, Jr Senior Judge Harold D. Vietor Senior Judge Virgil Pittman
Honorable Terry F. Moorer Honorable W. Harold Albritton, III Honorable Judge W. Harold Albritton, III Honorable Judge Terry F. Moorer Honorable Judge Susan Russ Walker Hon. Marian W. Payson Hon. Charles J. Siragusa

rare

US Magistrate Judge T Michael Putnam Designated Judge David A. Ezra Sr US District Judge Richard G Kopf

Moving the previous issue from the Google Code because I like the idea and would like to implement it, someday. Originally posted by jayqhacker, Feb 7, 2012.

Ph.D., Esq., M.D. and other titles are classified as suffixes. This is perhaps convenient for parsing, since they appear at the end of a name, but they are in fact titles. A suffix distinguishes people and is part of your legal name; a title does not and (in most countries) is not. "J. Smith Jr." and "J. Smith Sr." are certainly different people, whereas "J. Smith", "J. Smith, PhD" and "J. Smith, MD" may or may not be.

I propose titles end up in the .title field, and suffices end up in the .suffix field.

Name parsing is a hard problem; ultimately I think you'd want a statistical, machine learning approach, but you can probably get pretty far with rules.

The two issues are: 1) some suffixes are part of your name, some aren't; and 2) some titles come before your name, some after.

You could solve both by splitting titles into pre- and post-titles, and making suffixes just ('jr','sr','2','i','ii','iii','iv','v').

Project Member #3 derek73

I played with adding a new list to keep track of titles that were added at the end. If we treat the suffixes as a definitive and complete list, then we can assume anything else is a title. The initials "i" and "v" are problematic, but we could probably assume that they are initials in the case of "John V".

I like the idea of separating out the parts of the name that definitely signify another person, and your definition of suffix. Thinking about it, I guess a suffix always comes directly after the name? Like you wouldn't have "John Doe, Phd, Jr". Also the case of having 2 suffixes seems somewhat remote, e.g. "'Smith, John E, III, Jr'"? So I guess that would make the patterns look something like this.

# no commas:      title first middle middle middle last suffix|title_suffix title_suffix
# suffix comma:   title first middle last, suffix|title_suffix [, title_suffix]
# lastname comma: last, title first middles[,] suffix|title_suffix [,title_suffix]

SUFFIXES = set((
    'jr','sr','2','i','ii','iii','iv','v',
))

TITLE_SUFFIXES = set((
    'phd','md','esquire','esq','clu','chfc','cfp',
))

I got as far as finding that equality test would need to be updated. It got me wondering if perhaps we should change the equality test, per your example, to test that ' '.join(first, middle, last, suffix) are the same. Perhaps its easy enough for someone to test if unicode() representations are equal on their own if they want titles too. Or maybe that's too smart.

That sounds like a reasonable approach. I don't personally use equality, but you might consider having it do the "dumb" least-surprise exact comparison, and adding a similarity method that returns a float in 0.0 - 1.0, eventually aiming for something like the probability that these two names reference the same person.

Also, watch out for "King John V." ;)

Hi Derek, I have a usecase where I need to parse names containing comma(,), but the library seems to work differently in this case. from nameparser import HumanName as hm #1) here first name should be-E ANNE and lastname should be-LEONARDO hm("E Anne D,Leonardo") <HumanName : [ title: '' first: 'Leonardo' middle: '' last: 'E Anne D' suffix: '' nickname: '' ]>

#2) here first name should be-Marry Ann and lastname should be-Luther hm("Mary Ann H,Luther") <HumanName : [ title: '' first: 'Luther' middle: '' last: 'Mary Ann H' suffix: '' nickname: '' ]>

Even if I removed the comma from the name, it has different output.

hm("Mary Ann H Luther") <HumanName : [ title: '' first: 'Mary' middle: 'Ann H' last: 'Luther' suffix: '' nickname: '' ]>

I believe acronym-based suffixes are being incorrectly capitalized.

> python3
Python 3.8.10 (default, Jun 22 2022, 20:18:18) 
[GCC 9.4.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import nameparser
>>> nameparser.__version__
'1.1.1'
>>> n = nameparser.HumanName('GREGORY HOUSE M.D.')
>>> n
<HumanName : [
	title: '' 
	first: 'GREGORY' 
	middle: '' 
	last: 'HOUSE' 
	suffix: 'M.D.'
	nickname: ''
]>
>>> n.capitalize()
>>> n
<HumanName : [
	title: '' 
	first: 'Gregory' 
	middle: '' 
	last: 'House' 
	suffix: 'M.d.'
	nickname: ''
]>
>>> 

I believe the suffix should be 'M.D.'

I have this name: John Smith I'd like to reformat the name to look like this: Smith, John

I've set the formatting I'd like to use:

from nameparser.config import CONSTANTS
CONSTANTS.string_format = "{last} {suffix}, {title} {first} ({nickname}) {middle}"

The result I get is: Smith , John due to the space that precedes {suffix} in my string_format.

However, I'd like the suffix to follow the last name if it ever occurs. Does your package allow for the trimming of space if no suffix exists, or should I implement this on my end?

Apologies if this is already addressed in the documentation! Thank you!

nameparser version 1.1.1

When I use HumanName with the string "John W. Ingram, V", it can't parse correctly but if I remove the comma, it works. Also, if I try using IV (4th) instead of V (5th), then it works with the comma so I think even though V seems to be recognized in the documentation, it isn't fully working.

from nameparser import HumanName
>>> name = HumanName("John W. Ingram, V")
>>> name
<HumanName : [
	title: '' 
	first: 'V' 
	middle: '' 
	last: 'John W. Ingram' 
	suffix: ''
	nickname: ''
]>
>>> name = HumanName("John W. Ingram V")
>>> name
<HumanName : [
	title: '' 
	first: 'John' 
	middle: 'W.' 
	last: 'Ingram' 
	suffix: 'V'
	nickname: ''
]>

The library does not handle Arabic names well, even the most common patterns. I'm no expert on the topic, but I'm Arabic and know the common patterns.

Compound Names My first name is "Mohamad Ali", but the library identifies "Ali" as my middle name. Arabic full names of the form "Mohamad X Surname" are almost always meant to have "Mohamad X" as a first name (with exceptions such as when X is "El" or "Al", in which case the surname is compound with the first word being "El" or "Al"). Other exceptions are "Bin" (the library handles these correctly). Examples: Mohamad Khalil, Mohamad Amin, Mohamad Ali, Mohamad El Amin, Mohamad Bin Salman, etc...

Well-known Surname Suffixes Some names like "Mohamad Zeineddine" can be written as "Mohamad Zein El Dine". Here the first name is Mohamad and the surname is "Zein El Dine" which is equivalent to "Zeineddine". "El Dine"/"eddine" is an extremely common suffix to have in Arabic surnames (e.g. Zeineddine, Alameddine, Charafeddine, Safieddine, Saifeddine, etc...). Other suffixes like "-allah"/"-ullah"/"-ollah" are extremely common as well (e.g., Nasrallah). This is to say that "El Dine" and "Allah" are almost always the 2nd part of a surname (at least one more word is needed on the left to complete the surname)

Middle names hardly exist An Arabic-looking name is a good hint that there is no middle name. Arabic cultures adopt chaining of names instead of middle names (first name, followed by father's name, followed by father's father's name, etc..., and then the surname).

Edit: Honestly, the Wikipedia page discusses this really well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_name