Re: [Evolution] Full name parsing

[Jon Trowbridge <trow ximian com>]

On Mon, 2001-09-24 at 20:38, Pascal DeMilly wrote:
> When parsing a full name, I think Evolution should have a rule that know
> how to parse John & Jane Doe correctly. I propose that John & Jane
> should be firstname and Doe should be a lastname. Right now, John is a
> firstname, "&" is a middle name and Jane Doe is the lastname. 
>
> What do you think ?

I agree in principle, but trying to construct parsing rules that work
really well in a lot of unusual cases like this is really hard.  For
example, I've seen e-mail addresses like "Joe Smith & Family" and "John
Doe & Jane Roe".  Doing the right thing with &-separated names in all
(or even most) cases is a hard and murky problem.  And this is just one
of an essentially infinite number of obscure cases.  And to make things
even more complicated, the '&' character might have totally different
semantics in other languages, causing problems for all of our
non-English-using friends.

Not that trying to transparently doing the right isn't an important and
worthy goal.  It is just much trickier than it usually looks.

In the short term, I'd recommend using the contact editor to 'manually'
parse unsual constructions like 'John & Jane Doe'.  As you probably
already know, clicking on the "Full Name" button when editing a contact
lets you specify how the name should be broken into first/middle/last
parts.

-JT