# human-name
A library and command-line client for parsing and comparing human names.
[](https://travis-ci.org/djudd/human-name)
[`Documentation`](http://djudd.github.io/human-name)
# Uses and limitations
If you are trying to programmatically put human names into a canonical format,
you are of course in [a state of sin](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/).
But sometimes, something is better than nothing.
If you want to let your users enter arbitrary names but try to use a given name
in a salutation, or you're looking for a person's index in PubMed's list of authors
for a co-authored paper, or you want to extract surnames from unstructured name
entries for a frequency analysis, you might find this useful.
Most names are not unique. `human_name` will tell you that "J. Doe" might be "Jane Doe",
but of course it might not be, and even "Jane Doe" might not be the other "Jane Doe."
The comparison logic here is only useful if you have external reason to believe
two names may represent the same person.
`human_name` will work best on Latin names - i.e., data from North or South America
and/or Europe. For example, it doesn't understand surname-first formats without
commas, common in East Asia: "Park Geun-hye" will be parsed as having the given
name "Park", and the last name "Guen-hye". And it doesn't handle single-word names.
It won't blow up on Unicode, and it handles non-ASCII punctuation and accents
with some intelligence, but don't feed in Arabic or Han characters and expect
better results than a naive whitespace or word-boundary split.
`human_name` tries to fail nicely, such that if parsing fails, either it will do
so explicitly, returning nothing, or at least, calling `display_full` on the result
will return the input, modulo whitespace. But there are no guarantees.
`human_name` tries aggressively to treat strings as names, which makes it
definitely _not_ suitable for extracting names from a larger piece of text
(although it will strip titles, nicknames, etc, from a name field.)
Because the goals of this library include both name comparison and memory efficiency,
parsed names are Unicode NFKD-normalized and capitalized in a conventional way
(handling "Mc" and a few other edge cases), and the raw input is not preserved.
# From Rust code
```rust
use human_name::Name;
let jane_doe = Name::parse("Jane Doe").unwrap();
let john_doe = Name::parse("John Doe").unwrap();
let j_doe = Name::parse("Doe, J.").unwrap();
assert!(jane_doe.consistent_with(&j_doe));
assert!(!jane_doe.consistent_with(&john_doe));
let oscar = Name::parse("MR OSCAR DE LA HOYA JR").unwrap();
assert_eq!(Some("Oscar"), oscar.given_name());
assert_eq!("de la Hoya", oscar.surname());
assert_eq!(Some("Jr."), oscar.suffix());
assert_eq!("Oscar de la Hoya, Jr.", oscar.display_full());
assert!(Name::parse("foo@bar.com").is_none());
```
See the [docs](http://djudd.github.io/human-name) for details.
# From the command line
There are two modes, "parse" and "eq". The mode is passed as the first argument.
You can pass input as subsequent arguments:
```bash
$ human_name parse "Jane Doe"
{"first_initial":"J","given_name":"Jane","surname":"Doe"}
$ human_name parse "MR OSCAR DE LA HOYA JR"
{"first_initial":"O","given_name":"Oscar","suffix":"Jr.","surname":"de la Hoya"}
$ human_name eq "Jane Doe" "Jane M. Doe"
y
$ echo $?
0
$ human_name eq "Jane M. Doe" "Jane H. Doe"
n
$ echo $?
1
```
Or, with the second argument "-", you can pass input on stdin. For example,
to find the most common surnames in a file of newline-delimited names:
```bash
$ human_name parse - < names.txt | jq .surname | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n3
111 "Zhang"
109 "Li"
106 "Wang"
```
To find all the possible "J. Smith"s in a file of newline-delimited names:
```bash
$ human_name eq - "J Smith" < names.text
Smith, Jason A.
Jay Smith
```
# Optional Features
The following features are enabled by default, but can be turned off when `human_name`
is being used as a library.
## name_eq_hash
Implements `Eq` for `Name` using `consistent_with`, and `Hash` using `surname_hash`.
Optional because both of these implementations are questionable for general-purpose
use: this `Eq` is not transitive, and `Hash` is collision-prone. See docs for details.
## serialization
Implements serialization for `Name` using `serde`. This serialization format is
intended to allow programs not using `human_name` to see the parse results;
deserialization isn't implemented because when round-tripping is desired, just
using `display_full` to serialize as a string and then `parse` to deserialize
should produce a more compact and reasonably performant result.
# Bindings in other languages
Ruby bindings using the `ffi` gem are available at [github.com/djudd/human-name-rb](https://github.com/djudd/human-name-rb)
Python bindings using the `ctypes` module are available at [github.com/djudd/human-name-py](https://github.com/djudd/human-name-py)
# Performance
As of version 0.8, the fast path (roughly, two space-separated, titlecase ASCII
words), name parsing takes about a microsecond and does not heap-allocate.
Pathological cases can take up to ten times as long.
There are a few places where the code would be simpler with regexes, but in the
hot path this seems to be slower, and doing without isn't too hard, so we avoid
the dependency.
# Credit
Inspiration, heuristics, and test cases were taken from:
* [`people` (Ruby)](https://github.com/academia-edu/people)
* [`nameparser` (Python)](https://github.com/derek73/python-nameparser/)
* [`HumanNameParse` (Java)](https://github.com/tupilabs/HumanNameParser.java)
* [`namae` (Ruby)](https://github.com/berkmancenter/namae)
* [`Lingua::EN::NameParse` (Perl)](http://search.cpan.org/~kimryan/Lingua-EN-NameParse-1.33/lib/Lingua/EN/NameParse.pm) (probably the original for some of the other ports as well)
* [`Lingua::EN::Nickname` (Perl)](http://search.cpan.org/~brianl/Lingua-EN-Nickname-1.16/Nickname.pm)
In terms of name formats, `human_name` covers just about all the cases these libraries
do, and more. However, at the moment, unlike most of them, it throws away titles and
nicknames, rather than merely separating them.
I wrote this mostly as a side project to learn Rust (so apologies for any
unidiomatic code), but thanks also to Academia.edu for giving me real-world use
cases.
# Contributing
Please do! I'm not going to set up a CONTRIBUTING.md until there's evidence
anyone is actually interested, but feel free either to just submit a pull request
or to email me (see Cargo.toml) if you have any questions.
# License
Apache 2.0 - see LICENSE.