Parse more team members

[matdillen]

I've seen some teams provided that fail to get parsed using this gem. I think it might be possible to enable them to be parsed without any (big) collateral. Examples:

A. Aceby X. Villavicencio G. Lettau in herb. V. J. Grummann G. v. Reenen J. Aguirre C. C. Schulte F. Anton Mayer und Franz Petzi G. Fischer und K. E. Harz J. Poelt & A. Buschardt in Hb. Buschardt

I wonder if these could not be systematically parsed as:

A. Aceby and X. Villavicencio G. Lettau G. Reenen and J. Aguirre and C. C. Schulte F. Anton Mayer and Franz Petzi G. Fischer and K. E. Harz. J. Poelt and A. Buschardt

That is, add rules so that:

• und is recognized as another conjunction (similar to how it already works for and, et and en)
• text after in herb or variations of it is dropped
• Teams that lack delimiting characters can be parsed based on the location of initials. A sequence of initials non-trivial string initials non-trivial string and so on is split into elements, as long as the string does start with an initial. Sometimes it may end with another initial, this one would then be considered part of the last name string (e.g. the F. in the third example). This is still not perfect, e.g. the correct second name in the third example is actually J. Aguirre C., but it should enable more teams effectively getting parsed. It may be a bit too aggressive an implementation, but I would presume (hopefully correctly) that unparsed teams are more undesirable than leftover errors in the resulting splits or poor splits of unparseable strings.

I noticed the v. gets dropped from the third example in the current implementation. Not sure why that happens.

[dshorthouse]

Thanks for these! It's a great help. I've managed to accommodate some of these, but others will remain intractable.

The most difficult one to contend with is: A. Aceby X. Villavicencio because there are numerous examples of agent namestrings like M. Alex A. Smith that are not two agents, but one - shortened form for "Michael Alex Andrew Smith". The und was a missed separator - that one was easy and was an oversight. The in herb. and in Hb. were likewise relatively easy to accommodate. The v. particle as erroneously stripped out in the cleaning routine and since restored. Version 3.0.4.0 was just pushed to RubyGems.org and should be available soon.

So...

A. Aceby X. Villavicencio and G. v. Reenen J. Aguirre C. C. Schulte F. remain too challenging to accommodate without breaking things elsewhere.

[dshorthouse]

Deployed to production and you can test the outcome in a UI at https://bionomia.net/parse

[matdillen]

Thanks for the quick reply and update! The M. Alex A. Smith example makes me wonder how many of those are there. I would expect it's not as common to have initials and full length name parts mixed like that.

I'll see if I can find another workaround.