nameparts

nameparts is a Python module that I wrote to address a problem splitting full names into individual parts (first, middle, last, etc.)

You can use it like this:

  >>> from nameparts import Name
  >>> n = Name("Thurston Howel III")
  >>> n.first_name
  'Thurston'
  >>> n.last_name
  'Howel'
  >>> n.as_dict
  {'first_name': 'Thurston', 'last_name': 'Howel', \
    'middle_name': None, 'suffix': None, 'generation': 'III', \
    'salutation': None}
  >>> n = Name("Smith, John Paul")
  >>> n.first_name
  'John'
  >>> n.last_name
  'Smith'
  >>> n.middle_name
  'Paul'

If you suspect you may see more than one name in a given field (i.e. separated by a/k/a) you can use MultiName:

  >>> from nameparts import MultiName
  >>> names = MultiName("Bruce Wayne a/k/a Batman")
  >>> names
  [<Name: 'Bruce Wayne'>, <Name: 'Batman'>]
  >>> [n.as_dict for n in names]
  [{'last_name': 'Wayne', 'salutation': None, 'first_name': 'Bruce', 'suffix': None, 
    'generation': None, 'middle_name': None, 'aliases': None}, 
   {'last_name': '', 'salutation': None, 'first_name': 'Batman', 'suffix': None, 
    'generation': None, 'middle_name': None, 'aliases': None}]

MultiName automatically uses the string 'a/k/a' to split names, but you can provide an optional splitter argument to override that:

  >>> from nameparts import MultiName
  >>> names = MultiName("Tony Stark | Ironman | Stark, Tony", splitter="|")
  >>> names
  [<Name: 'Tony Stark'>, <Name: 'Ironman'>, <Name: 'Tony Stark'>]

Installing

From source:

   python setup.py install

via pip:

   pip install nameparts

nameparts runs on CPython 2.6, 2.7, 3.2 and PyPy

License

nameparts is released under the BSD license.

Comments/Questions/Improvements

Any of the above are welcome. Contact me at the email address in my profile.