These are always fun: [The Right Honorable] Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, DL, FRS, RA
William Henry Gates II William Henry "Bill" Gates III The only solution I have managed for this is to separate the printed/presented form of the name from the form of name to be used in sorting, ranking, and maybe searching. There is redundancy, but it all works. The presented form might be derived from the fragments which are more easily handled in separate fields, especially for sorting and searching purposes. I've seen forms that ask for a prefix, given name(s), family name, and suffixes. Then they are arranged appropriately into a concatenated form for presentation, mailing labels, organization rosters, whatever. Now, in some cultures and languages, the family name is written before, not after the given name(s), and that is also how the name is spoken. Have to deal with that too sometimes. - Dennis > -----Original Message----- > From: Julian Thomas [mailto:j...@jt-mj.net] > Sent: Friday, January 15, 2016 16:22 > To: Open Office Apache list <users@openoffice.apache.org> > Subject: Re: [ PROPOSAL ] A new REVERSE string function for Spreadsheets > > > > On Jan 15, 2016, at 11:49, Ross Murray <rossmurray.a...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > > I would like to see a REVERSE function, which returns a new string > with > > characters in reverse order to the target string. > > > > I am attempting to remove duplicates after merging many files to > create a > > very large list of names. Names may or may not have middle names; > and/or > > initials which may or may not be follows by full stops. I would like > to > > extract the last names and use those the primary sort key. While > feasible > > with existing functions, it would seem easiest to - REVERSE the full > names; > > FIND the first space; RIGHT to extract the last names; and REVERSE > those to > > their original form. > > If I were to face this issue today [I think I've struggled with it in > the past and most of the manipulations were manual], I'd save the file > as a CSV. I would then in the scripting language of your choice [Rexx or > Python would be mine] process each line of the CSV, parsing the name > fields and add a new field for last name, writing out a new CSV which > could then be opened and sorted. > > Don't forget John Smith PhD or Sam Adams IV or Jr. > > — > jt - j...@jt-mj.net > > Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now. > > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org
