Re: [Evolution] Full name parsing

[Pascal DeMilly <list evolution newgenesys com>]

I agree with you. But what about a rule that will help the parser in
deciding what is what. We could use the comma as a separator when in add
mode. So for example:

John & Jane, Doe will parse correctly. The comma could be removed
automatically by Evolution once the parsing is done. Obviously this rule
should only apply to full name not company name.

Therefore the rule will be as follow. Start by the end and find the 1st
comma. If there is none, apply existing rule. If there is one, we have a
last name. Then continue to the next comma, If we have none apply
existing rule. If we have one, we have a middle name. The rest if the
first name.

Therefore I should have inputed "John & Jane,, Doe" to be parsed
correctly. Evolution will remove the commas, and print it as "John &
Jane Doe".

Could that be implemented ?

Pascal

On Mon, 2001-09-24 at 22:08, Jon Trowbridge wrote:
> 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