MSc in title makes for some strange behaviour.

[lawli3t]

I am currently trying to parse names with the nameparser which works perfectly fine, except i encounter some errors when trying to parse trailing titles such as MSc.

Here is a small example of what I am trying to do:

>>> from nameparser import HumanName
>>> HumanName("Dr. med. univ. Margit Popp")
<HumanName : [
    title: 'Dr. med. univ.' 
    first: 'Margit' 
    middle: '' 
    last: 'Popp' 
    suffix: ''
    nickname: ''
]>
>>> HumanName("Dr. med. univ. Margit Popp, MSc")
<HumanName : [
    title: 'MSc' 
    first: 'Dr. med. univ. Margit Popp' 
    middle: '' 
    last: '' 
    suffix: ''
    nickname: ''
]>

The first example works perfectly fine, but as soon as MSc is in the game it doesnt recognize the other titles nor split the name correctly. I have added MSc (as well as med. + univ.) to the CONSTANTS but it doesnt seem to help. It also acts strange when i just use default settings:

>>> HumanName("Dr. med. univ. Margit Popp, MSc")
<HumanName : [
    title: '' 
    first: 'MSc' 
    middle: '' 
    last: 'Dr. med. univ. Margit Popp' 
    suffix: ''
    nickname: ''
]>

What i would be expecting is:

>>> HumanName("Dr. med. univ. Margit Popp, MSc")
<HumanName : [
    title: 'MSc Dr. med. univ.' 
    first: 'Margit' 
    middle: '' 
    last: 'Popp' 
    suffix: ''
    nickname: ''
]>

I am running python 3.4 with the latest version of nameparser. Is there any possibility of making this work? Am i just missing some customizable setting?

thanks for your help

[derek73]

Hmm, it looks like a bug. Thanks for reporting it. I'll look into it.

One probably minor thing, the MSc would go into the suffix property because it comes at the end of the name. In a future version I'm going to change those attribute names to prenominal and postnominal so people don't expect it to be semantic. It's based solely on position in the string.

[derek73]

Ahh, I see now. It's because "MSc" is not in a recognized suffix, so it assumes it's the "lastname, firstname" format. If you add "MSc" to your suffixes set it should work as expected.

    >>> from nameparser.config import CONSTANTS
    >>> CONSTANTS.suffixes.add('msc')

I'll go ahead and add that to the suffix/post-nominal constants in the next release.

[lawli3t]

Ah I see thanks, that fixes that problem.

Another one i have though is that if i add MSc to both suffixes and titles it doesnt work. It works fine for MSc in one of those two though. The data i have is very messy sadly so some rows have the MSc as a prefix others as a suffix. Is there any possibility of incorporating those two?

Otherwise i'd have to get a bit dirty with multiple instances i guess.

Thanks for your fast and thorough response though, appreciate it!

edit:

hm, doesnt seem the suffix is working sometimes, for instance i have added msc to titles as well as suffixes and get the following results:

>>> HumanName("MSc Dr. Margit Popp MSc")
<HumanName : [
    title: 'MSc Dr.' 
    first: 'Margit' 
    middle: 'Popp' 
    last: 'MSc' 
    suffix: ''
    nickname: ''
]>

I would expect MSc to be in the suffix too, even if i omit the first MSc it doesnt get parsed even though it is in the suffix set.

>>> HumanName("Dr. Margit Popp MSc")
<HumanName : [
    title: 'Dr.' 
    first: 'Margit' 
    middle: 'Popp' 
    last: 'MSc' 
    suffix: ''
    nickname: ''
]>
>>> HumanName("Dr. Margit Popp, MSc")
<HumanName : [
    title: 'MSc' 
    first: 'Dr. Margit Popp' 
    middle: '' 
    last: '' 
    suffix: ''
    nickname: ''
]>

[derek73]

Ok, I think I figured out what's going on. I recently separated suffixes into 2 groups, ones that are acronyms and could be separated by periods, and ones that are not. So I guess this means updating the suffixes set now has no effect. You'll need need to add your custom suffixes to CONSTANTS.suffix_acronyms in this case, or CONSTANTS.suffix_not_acronyms.

>>> from nameparser import HumanName
>>> from nameparser.config import CONSTANTS
>>> CONSTANTS.suffix_acronyms.add('msc')
>>> HumanName("Dr. Margit Popp MSc")
<HumanName : [
   title: 'Dr.' 
   first: 'Margit' 
   middle: '' 
   last: 'Popp' 
   suffix: 'MSc'
   nickname: ''
]>