Regex for retrieving initials from Name

Question

eg. if the Name is: John Deer the Initials should be: JD 

I can use substrings to perform this check in the Initials field, but I wonder if I can write a regular expression for it? And does regex write better than doing this using string methods?

Answer 1

Personally, I prefer this regex

 Regex initials = new Regex(@"(\b[a-zA-Z])[a-zA-Z]* ?"); string init = initials.Replace(nameString, "$1"); //Init = "JD" 

This applies to the initialization and removal of spaces (in the end it is a “?”).

The only thing you need to worry about is names and frustrations, such as junior or senior, or Mrs. .... etc. etc. Some people include in their full names

Answer 2

Here is my solution. My goal was not to provide the simplest solution, but one that could take different (sometimes weird) name formats and generate the best guess for the first and last name (or in the case of anonymous people) with one initial.

I also tried to write it in a way that is relatively international, with unicode regular expressions, although I have no experience generating initials for many kinds of foreign names (e.g. Chinese), although it should at least generate something suitable for representing a person , under two characters. For example, serving it in Korean like “행운 의 복숭아” will give you 행복 as you might expect (although this may not be the right way to do this in Korean culture).

 /// <summary> /// Given a person first and last name, we'll make our best guess to extract up to two initials, hopefully /// representing their first and last name, skipping any middle initials, Jr/Sr/III suffixes, etc. The letters /// will be returned together in ALL CAPS, eg "TW". /// /// The way it parses names for many common styles: /// /// Mason Zhwiti -> MZ /// mason lowercase zhwiti -> MZ /// Mason G Zhwiti -> MZ /// Mason G. Zhwiti -> MZ /// John Queue Public -> JP /// John Q. Public, Jr. -> JP /// John Q Public Jr. -> JP /// Thurston Howell III -> TH /// Thurston Howell, III -> TH /// Malcolm X -> MX /// A Ron -> AR /// AA Ron -> AR /// Madonna -> M /// Chris O'Donnell -> CO /// Malcolm McDowell -> MM /// Robert "Rocky" Balboa, Sr. -> RB /// 1Bobby 2Tables -> BT /// Éric Ígor -> ÉÍ /// 행운의 복숭아 -> 행복 /// /// </summary> /// <param name="name">The full name of a person.</param> /// <returns>One to two uppercase initials, without punctuation.</returns> public static string ExtractInitialsFromName(string name) { // first remove all: punctuation, separator chars, control chars, and numbers (unicode style regexes) string initials = Regex.Replace(name, @"[\p{P}\p{S}\p{C}\p{N}]+", ""); // Replacing all possible whitespace/separator characters (unicode style), with a single, regular ascii space. initials = Regex.Replace(initials, @"\p{Z}+", " "); // Remove all Sr, Jr, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX at the end of names initials = Regex.Replace(initials.Trim(), @"\s+(?:[JS]R|I{1,3}|I[VX]|VI{0,3})$", "", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); // Extract up to 2 initials from the remaining cleaned name. initials = Regex.Replace(initials, @"^(\p{L})[^\s]*(?:\s+(?:\p{L}+\s+(?=\p{L}))?(?:(\p{L})\p{L}*)?)?$", "$1$2").Trim(); if (initials.Length > 2) { // Worst case scenario, everything failed, just grab the first two letters of what we have left. initials = initials.Substring(0, 2); } return initials.ToUpperInvariant(); } 

Answer 3

How about this?

 var initials = Regex.Replace( "John Deer", "[^AZ]", "" ); 

Answer 4

Here's an alternative with an emphasis on its simplicity:

  /// <summary> /// Gets initials from the supplied names string. /// </summary> /// <param name="names">Names separated by whitespace</param> /// <param name="separator">Separator between initials (eg "", "." or ". ") </param> /// <returns>Upper case initials (with separators in between)</returns> public static string GetInitials(string names, string separator) { // Extract the first character out of each block of non-whitespace Regex extractInitials = new Regex(@"\s*([^\s])[^\s]*\s*"); return extractInitials.Replace(names, "$1" + separator).ToUpper(); } 

The question is what to do if the names provided are not as expected. Personally, I think that it should just return the first character from each piece of text that is not a space. For example:

 1Steve 2Chambers => 12 harold mcDonald => HM David O'Leary => DO David O' Leary => DOL Ronnie "the rocket" O'Sullivan => R"RO 

There will be those who will argue about more complex / complex methods (for example, it's better to deal with the latter), but IMO is really a data cleaning problem.

Answer 5

try this one

 (^| )([^ ])([^ ])*','\2') 

or this

  public static string ToInitials(this string str) { return Regex.Replace(str, @"^(?'b'\w)\w*,\s*(?'a'\w)\w*$|^(?'a'\w)\w*\s*(?'b'\w)\w*$", "${a}${b}", RegexOptions.Singleline) } 

http://www.kewney.com/posts/software-development/using-regular-expressions-to-get-initials-from-a-string-in-c-sharp

Answer 6

Yes, use regex. You can use the Regex.Match and Regex.Match.Groups methods to find matches, and then extract the values ​​you need - the initials in this case. Search and retrieval of values ​​will occur simultaneously.

Answer 7

[az]+[az]+\b to be clean. The first two letters of each name ...

where name = 'Greg Henry' = 'GH' or 'James Smith' 'J S'

Then you can split by `` and join ''

This works even with type names.

'James Henry George Michael' = 'JHG M'

'James Henry George Michael III second' = 'JHGM III'

If you want to avoid separation, use [az]+[az]+\b ?

But then names like Jon Michael Jr. The 3rd Jon Michael Jr. The 3rd will be = JMJr.T3 , where, as stated above, you can get "The", "the" and "3rd" if you want ..

If you really wanted to be a fantasy, can you use (\b[a-zA-Z])[a-zA-Z]* ? to match only parts of the name, and then replace with the former.

Answer 8

How about this:

  string name = "John Clark MacDonald"; var parts = name.Split(' '); string initials = ""; foreach (var part in parts) { initials += Regex.Match(part, "[AZ]"); Console.WriteLine(part + " --> " + Regex.Match(part,"[AZ]")); } Console.WriteLine("Final initials: " + initials); Console.ReadKey(); 

This allows you to use optional middle names and works for multiple capital letters, as shown above.