Regular expressions again :(

[timgerr]

Hey all, I have a list of names (in the thousands) that I need to clean up. Some of the names have characters like % * # and others have numbers like 123. I need to strip these out but not things like apostrophes or dashes. Here are some examples

Bad

gallagher#4454
thomas(acee)
parson[jnogood]

Good

O'Tool
Mary-kate

I want to so something like $name = s/ / but I am not sure what the regular expression would be.... any ideas?

Thanks,
timgerr

-How important does a person have to be before they are considered assassinated instead of just murdered?
-Need more cow bell!!!

 

[Kirsle]

Maybe...

my @orig = (...long list of names...);
my @new = ();

foreach (@orig) {
   if (/[^A-Za-z\'\- ]/) { # if contains anything but these
      next;
   }
   push (@new,$_);
}

-------------
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Project Fearless | My web blog

 

[MillerH]

I suggest that you break this up into multiple steps. Names are complicated constructs, and trying to fix these in a single regex is not the way to go.

Instead use a list of regex to both fix bad names, but also to verify that a name is correct. Slowly build on these lists until you find that every name that is fixed matches your success conditions.

That is how I would do this type of project anyway.

- Miller

 

[fishiface]

I'd use Lingua::EN::NameParse (

http://search.cpan.org/~kimryan/Lingua-EN-NameParse-1.24/lib/Lingua/EN/NameParse.pm),

which handles most of the problems you are likely to encounter.

Yours,

fish

["]As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.["]
--Maurice Wilkes, 1949