Extracting parts of names from full names

[anotherhoward]

I have a list of names in this format: Luis Gonzalez\gonzalu01

Eddie Perez\perezed02

B.J. Surhoff\surhob.01

Bobby Bonilla\bonilbo01

Keith Lockhart\lockhke01 I want to extract the last names and separately extract what comes before each last name (which could be just the first name or two initials as in "B.J.") so that I can later organize them this way: First       Last Luis        Gonzalez Eddie      Eddie B.J.         Surhoff Bobby     Bobby Keith       Lockhart I do not need the data after the slash. How can I use GREF (REGEX) to extract the last names and separately the first/middle values?

[Kerri Hicks]

How confident are you in your data source that you will always have names in the format of "string with no spaces" "space" "string with no spaces"?

Will you ever have names like:

Jamie Lee Curtis (space in the "first" names)

Onne van der Wal (space in the surname)

or other variants?

The expression will depend on your answer to that question.

--Kerri

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[Sam Hathaway]

Do the “last names” in your dataset always consist of the final word before the backslash? If so, you can use:

Find: (.*) (\S+)\\.*
Replace: \1\t\2

But eventually you will need to deal with names that don’t fit this pattern and then you will be sad. For example, in the name Saúl Rodriguez Luna, the “last name” is “Rodriguez Luna”.

You might want to read this:
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

Hope this helps.
-sam

[Darren Duncan]

What is the business case for this separation? For all practical purposes
keeping the name as a single string is best. A better solution to your problem
may be changing anything that expects parts to expect a single combined name
instead, which would then work for names of any nationality. -- Darren Duncan

On 2020-02-27 1:43 p.m., 'anotherhoward' via BBEdit Talk wrote:
> I have a list of names in this format:
>
> Luis Gonzalez\gonzalu01
> Eddie Perez\perezed02
> B.J. Surhoff\surhob.01
> Bobby Bonilla\bonilbo01
> Keith Lockhart\lockhke01
>
> I want to extract the last names and separately extract what comes before each
> last name
> (which could be just the first name or two initials as in "B.J.") so that I can
> later organize them this way:
>

> *First       Last*

[ThePorgie]

He might be doing a variable data job where the usage in one instance he needs the first name only. In another instance he needs the whole name....Just off the top of my head Darren.

[John Delacour]

On 27 Feb 2020, at 21:43, 'anotherhoward' via BBEdit Talk <bbe...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I have a list of names in this format:

B.J. Surhoff\surhob.01
Bobby Bonilla\bonilbo01

I want to extract the last names and separately extract what comes before each last name 
(which could be just the first name or two initials as in "B.J.") so that I can later organize them this way:

B.J.         Surhoff
Bobby     Bobby

I do not need the data after the slash.

How can I use GREF (REGEX) to extract the last names and separately the first/middle values?

If you don’t need to script it,

search for: (.+?) ([^ ]+?)\\.+

Replace all with \1 \2

JD

[John Delacour]

On 28 Feb 2020, at 16:00, I wrote:

Replace all with \1 \2

…or Extract, of course!

[anotherhoward]

I would like to thank everyone for their thoughtful comments. Because of them, I realize that what would work best for me are Sam's with a space replacing the "\t" in the replacement pattern and John's.