Including "Sr." or "Jr." in name where applicable

[anotherhoward]

In a previous post, "Extracting parts of names from full names," I asked about how to extract the first and last names from a string.

Here is an input sample:

Felix Jose\josefe01

Tony Clark\clarkto02

Matt Williams\willima04

John McDonald\mcdonjo03

Mark Grace\gracema01

Steve Finley\finlest01

B.J. Surhoff\surhob.01

J.T. Snow\snowj.01

When I re-examined the full dataset, I noticed two cases not included previously.

Eric Young Sr.\younger0

Ken Griffey Jr.\griffke02

Based on the helpful feedback I got in my previous post, now what I need is a pattern that would handle not only all the original input items plus the two new cases. Further, what I would like extracted is everything up to but not including the backslash.

This attempt (of mine) finds everything in the original dataset, but I was unable to expand it to include either the "Sr." or "Jr.":

^([a-z,A-Z,\.]+) ([a-z,A-Z]+)

1. Is there a way my attempt can be expanded so it includes "Sr." or "Jr." when a name has either of them?

2. What pattern would you write to accomplish the task?

[David G Wagner]

You could add:

(\s(jr|sr).){0,1} within the last set of parens so would look like:

^([a-z,A-Z,\.]+) ([a-z,A-Z]+(\s(jr|sr).){0,1})

This would handle those who do not put a period after the Jr or Sr also. 

Wags ;)
WagsWorld
Hebrews 4:15
Ph(primary) : 408-914-1341
Ph(secondary): 408-761-7391

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[anotherhoward]

Thanks. How does this part of the expression work?—  (\s(jr|sr).){0,1})

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[David G Wagner]

It works but is not quite right. That period there should really be expanded to:

\.{0,1}

So it should read now as:

^([a-z,A-Z,\.]+) ([a-z,A-Z]+(\s(jr|sr)\.{0,1}){0,1})

Where my new part says:

A space followed by either Jr or Sr and there will be a period and not.  

The {} has a low and high:

{1,2} what preceded the { can occur either one or two times

{1,} says what preceded the { can occur 1 or more times

Probably a number of other ways, but this should now work with jr or st with it without a period following...

Sorry about the incorrect first pass... ;)

Wags ;)
WagsWorld
Hebrews 4:15
Ph(primary) : 408-914-1341
Ph(secondary): 408-761-7391

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[153957]

First a reply to previous suggestions:

Since {0,1} means 'this occurs 0 or 1 times' it can be replaces by ?, since that means the same. So the following also works:

^([a-z,A-Z,\.]+) ([a-z,A-Z]+(\s(jr|sr)\.?)?)

Also the , in the [a-z,A-Z,\.] blocks are not necessary, if you do want to allow a comma you can leave it in, but once is enough [a-zA-Z,\.], without the , you can just use [a-zA-Z\.] . Moreover, I see that the suggestion for Jr./Sr. is only lower case, so I assume you do not have case sensitivity enabled, so then [a-z\.] would also suffice for the first names, resulting in this:

^([a-z\.]+) ([a-z]+(\s(jr|sr)\.?)?)

Now for an alternative suggestion to the shown data:

In your data example the full names are before a \ and the first name is probably 'anything before the first space' and last name 'everything after the space until the \' you can simply use:

(.+?) (.+?)\\

The first group will match everything until the first space, the second group everything after that until the first backslash, and both groups must contain at least one character.