Re: [Evolution-hackers] Handle Spanish names and surnames properly

[Aaron Weber <aweber novell com>]

David: 

 To handle multi-word last names, enter "Marin Carreño, David" in the "File Under" text box.

You can of course use a hyphen to turn them into a single word, but I know that's kind of cheating and kind of robbing people of their names, so that's not acceptable either technically or culturally.

a.

On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 23:29 +0200, David Marín Carreño wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> After two years, a bug submitted by me (#2982) continues in the Ximian
> bugzilla waiting for a bit of love...
>
> The bug is related with the way Evolution splits the whole name into
> parts (prefix, name, surname, middlename, suffix...). Also, it's related
> to bug #37297.
>
> I don't know if this division works perfectly for English names, but it
> doesn't with Spanish names, because of two main problems:
>
> * Here, in Spain, we often use our two surnames. For example, my own
> complete name: David Marin Carreño -> Name: David, Surname: Marín
> Carreño.
>
> Now, Evolution thinks that my first surname is my middle name, and
> indexes my name with my second surname (which is pretty annoying...)
>
> * Other people, in commercial activities, only uses their first surname,
> but they have a compound first name, that shouldn't be divided into
> First + Middle names. 
> For example: Francisco Javier López -> Name: Francisco Javier, Surname:
> López.
>
> Evolution now saves this name as "Francisco López", which is
> particularly wrong if we know that "Francisco Javier" is usually called
> "Javier", and not "Francisco"...
>
>
> Someone could say that this situation can be solutioned using the "Full
> Name" button... But this is bad when I want to quickly introduce new
> Spanish contacts into my addressbook... I don't want to press "Full
> name" button for make my Spanish contacts to get indexed well.
>
>
> After seeking the related module, I've found that the bug is related
> with the evolution-data-server/addressbook/libebook/e-name-western.c
> module, and its extremely rigid way for parsing names.
>
> According to this module, a given name-string is automatically divided
> into prefix, first, middle, nick, last and suffix. And this division
> doesn't depend on anything else.
>
> I think this is a problem, and there should be a way for changing the
> behaviour of e_name_western_parse function, and making it to depend on
> some settings, such as the current locale or a given configuration
> string extracted from a combo box, or a selection box
>
> For example, for English names, the configuration string could be:
>
> PARSE_STRING = "[PREFIX] FIRST [MIDDLE] LAST [SUFFIX]"
> with PREFIX = "Mr.", "Miss", "Mrs.", "Ms.", "Dr"
> and SUFFIX = "Jr", "Sr"
>
> and always indexing with LAST and FIRST.
>
> But, for Spanish names, this configuration string could be:
>
> PARSE_STRING = "[PREFIX] FIRST LAST+"
> or "[PREFIX] FIRST+ LAST"
>
> That is, a given string "Word1 Word2 Word3" could be parsed as: 
> Name: Word1, Surname: Word2 Word3 
> or
> Name: Word1 Word2, Surname: Word3 
>
> The user should be able to change among the different parsing rules when
> adding the contact into the addressbook, in both new-contact and
> quick-new-contact dialogs.
>
> What do you think about this solution?
>
>
> I'm offering help and time to program this question in my weekends, but
> I need some help for knowing which other modules should be changed.
>
>
> Greetings
>
> -- 
> David Marín Carreño <dmarin dyr es>
> Desarrollo y Recursos, S.L.
>
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