Reversing name order [closed]

Question

My current task is to create a (programming) algorithm which reverts a name's order. This since my country's formal name-listing order is different from international ones. The standard is often:

John Doe

However, the standard I must comply to has the following priority:

Doe, John

Our businesses often receives names in the international style, which needs to be converted to our national style.

However, I've yet to come up with a way to deal with double names and similar cases. As an example, how to convert the following name?

John Foo Doe => Doe, John Foo / Doe, Foo John

I'm appreciating all input on this broad question. Please list possible problems (and preferably its solution), or perhaps a project which has faced this problem before.

Answer 1

This is actually a really really hard (not in the NP-hard sense) problem to solve. Consider the following examples:

• Leonardo DiCaprio
• Dick Van Dyke
• Al Di Meola
• Gus Green Van Sant, Jr
• Barack Hussein Obama II
• George Herbert Walker Bush
• Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax

All of the above are real people from the English speaking world. As you can see, it is almost impossible to find any kind of pattern in their names.

It gets worse. What if you consider titles?

• Doctor Richard Phillips Feynman
• Sir Sean Connery
• Lord Ashley
• Admiral The Honourable Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax

Granted, for some of those, the title is easily separated from the name. I'd like to see you deal with that last one though. It gets even worse if you consider names coming from other languages. A Portuguese friend of mine is called Ana Maria Morais Sarmento de Campos. Honestly. Ana and Maria are her first names and everything else is divided into various classes of surnames.

Finally, some people have their own opinions on how their names should be written. For example, a member of this forum, Mr brian d foy, explains his own preferences very clearly here.

So, if there is any way to avoid it don't parse human names, not in English nor in any other language. It is almost impossible to formalize them. There are some workarounds and parsers available but none of them will work perfectly and their discussion is way out of scope on this site. Have a look at this post on StackOverflow for some examples.

Answer 2

Doe, John Foo would be correct and is used often. I have never seen "complete" reverse-name sorting where the name is listed as <last name>, <middle name> <first name>, it is always <last name>, <first name> <middle name>.