We do a lot of data migrations for Donor Tools – a lot of folks are coming to us from other systems, and they need their data ported over. Depending on the kind of system they were using, this can be anywhere from a quick script to a major data transformation headache.

Recently I needed a quick way to parse a full name string into name parts. Given a name like “Dr. Joe Donor, M.D.”, I wanted to end up with a name object with a prefix of “Dr.”, a suffix of “M.D.”, a first name of “Joe”, and a last name of “Donor”. Complicating matters, it also needed to be able to handle odd permutations like “Dr. and Mrs. Joe and Jane Donor”, etc.

The main problem that I had was with the “and”. If there was an “and”, it should put the preceding and following words together to form a single word. This turned out to be nearly impossible with regular expressions, but pretty easy with a combination of Ruby and regex. Here’s how it looks.

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class Name < ActiveRecord::Base

  def self.parse(name)
    return false unless name.is_a?(String)
    
    # First, split the name into an array
    parts = name.split
    
    # If any part is "and", then put together the two parts around it
    # For example, "Mr. and Mrs." or "Mickey and Minnie"
    parts.each_with_index do |part, i|
      if ["and", "&"].include?(part) and i > 0
        p3 = parts.delete_at(i+1)
        p2 = parts.at(i)
        p1 = parts.delete_at(i-1)
        parts[i-1] = [p1, p2, p3].join(" ")
      end
    end
    
    # Build a hash of the remaining parts
    {
      :suffix => (s = parts.pop unless parts.last !~ /(\w+\.|[IVXLM]+|[A-Z]+)$/),
      :last_name  => (l = parts.pop),
      :prefix => (p = parts.shift unless parts[0] !~ /^\w+\./),
      :first_name => (f = parts.shift),
      :middle_name => (m = parts.join(" "))
    }
  end

end

Here’s the output:

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Name.parse "Mr. Joe Donor"
=> {:middle_name=>"", :prefix=>"Mr.", :last_name=>"Donor", :suffix=>nil, :first_name=>"Joe"}

Name.parse "Dr. and Mrs. Joe Donor, M.D."
=> {:middle_name=>"", :prefix=>"Dr. and Mrs.", :last_name=>"Donor,", :suffix=>"M.D.", :first_name=>"Joe"}

Name.parse "Joe and Jane Donor"
=> {:middle_name=>"", :prefix=>nil, :last_name=>"Donor", :suffix=>nil, :first_name=>"Joe and Jane"}

Name.parse "Joe and Jane Major-Donor"
=> {:middle_name=>"", :prefix=>nil, :last_name=>"Major-Donor", :suffix=>nil, :first_name=>"Joe and Jane"}

After publicly swooning over Gist, I finally got my Gist invite yesterday! What a treat! I wanted to share a few quick first impressions.

First impression is that this is really, really cool. I put in a couple key bits of information, and it started sucking down my friends and followers (doesn’t that make me sound cool). After a while it had imported all my contacts, and put together a sort of aggregate “wall” for each.

Since many of my contacts were from Twitter, many have just their tweets in their contact wall. For example, I follow Guy Kawasaki, and since he doesn’t know I exist all I have on his wall is his prolific list of recent tweets. This is minorly useful, but I think it will start to get a lot more informative after I hook in more services and provide more detail about my contacts. However, for a few of my contacts I have a lot more information, such as rss feeds and such, which makes their contact record bristle with information.

One of the things I’m hoping for is Apple Mail integration. Currently they have an Outlook plugin, which looks promising but doesn’t work for me as a Mac user. Also, I had a bit of trouble connecting to my Google Apps account. Might have been a PBKAC (Problem Between Keyboard And Chair) error though.

All in all I’m very impressed. They’ve got an awesome service and I can’t wait to see how it develops.

This is an exciting time for Donor Tools! We’re growing, and I’m so pleased to welcome Chris Dumas to the Donor Tools team!

Chris is joining Donor Tools to head up business development. Chris has a tremendous amount of positive energy, and he knows his stuff. This is an exciting time at Donor Tools. We’re growing, momentum is building, and we’re excited about the new things that we have to offer in the coming months.

Read Chris’ remarks over on the Donor Tools blog →

Welcome Chris! It’s great to have you on board!

I am itching to try Gist. The idea, as I understand it, is that Gist gives you a web’s-eye view of the people who you email with. So you could see blog articles, tweets (maybe?), news, etc. about the person who just sent you a message. Pretty idea.

I haven’t gotten my invite yet, but I’m waiting with baited breath (hint hint). I’ll be sure to let you all know how it goes if I get an early invite to the beta.