PIEBALDconsult wrote:
At best you could put the last element in the last name field and everything else in the first name field.
That would yield a lot of problems where I live, as: 1) a lot of last names consist of two or three words, such as "Miel De Schepper" and "Jan van der Spiegel" (first names are Miel/Jan); here you should at least check for "de", "van der" and "van de" (all possible capitalizations) and when they occur they are part of the last name. 2) first names could be composite ("Jean-Paulus") and last names could be composite ("Paulus-Beeldens"); now what when one of them is composite, the hyphen is missing, and the middle word of three could be a second half of the first name, or the first half of the last name (say "Jean Paulus Beeldens")? I am 100% sure there isn't an algorithm that solves the problem, and IMO the best fit algorithm is very region dependent. :)
Luc Pattyn
I only read code that is properly indented, and rendered in a non-proportional font; hint: use PRE tags in forum messages