human-name-rb

Ruby bindings for the Rust crate human_name, a library for parsing and comparing human names.

See the human_name docs for details.

Examples

  require 'humanname'

  doe_jane = HumanName.parse("Doe, Jane")
  doe_jane.surname
  => "Doe"
  doe_jane.given_name
  => "Jane"
  doe_jane.initials
  => "J"

  j_doe = HumanName.parse("J. Doe")
  j_doe.surname
  => "Doe"
  j_doe.given_name
  => nil
  j_doe.initials
  => "J"

  j_doe == doe_jane
  => true
  j_doe == HumanName.parse("John Doe")
  => true
  doe_jane == HumanName.parse("John Doe")
  => false

Supported environments

With just bundle/gem install, OS X 10.12+.

If you're willing to do a little more work, anywhere supported by Helix and the nightly Rust compiler:

curl -s https://static.rust-lang.org/rustup.sh | sh -s -- --channel=nightly
git clone git@github.com:djudd/human-name-rb.git
cd human-name-rb
bundle exec rake

That will give you a .gem file in pkg/ which should work in environments similar to the one in which it was built.

Benchmark results

Comparing to people, namae, and human_name_parser, on 16k real examples taken mostly from PubMed author fields:

$ bundle exec rake benchmark
people gem:
  3.010000   0.030000   3.040000 (  3.032075)
namae gem:
  3.550000   0.080000   3.630000 (  3.630643)
human_name_parser gem:
  1.960000   0.030000   1.990000 (  1.991358)
this gem:
  0.100000   0.000000   0.100000 (  0.107794)

Our implementation uses a similar strategy to people and human_name_parser but covers significantly more edge cases, and also supports comparison. (human_name_parser also covers fewer edge cases than people, as of December 2015, which probably explains its speed advantage.)

namae uses a formal grammar, unlike this gem, and so probably captures some cases this does not, although it certainly also misses some which this captures.