Namae doesn't parse PHD titles

[freesteph]

We're using Faker to generate our test names, and I just noticed that Namae cannot parse a PHD title.

Namae.parse("Bernardo Franecki, PhD")

returns an empty array.

After a bit of googling, looks like this is a tangible use case that Namae should handle.

[drwl]

I encountered this too. I'm looking at other options, but if nothing proves fruitful I'll try to get around to submitting a pull request.

[freesteph]

I've had a look at the code (and the fascinating grammar file) and PHD is included in there, but the normal order, First Last, PHD, doesn't work. If you switch it around (PhD, First Last), it does parse each entity correctly.

Couldn't figure out a proper way to change the parsing order but hopefully it shouldn't be too hard.

[inukshuk]

I think there are two aspects to this: one is you can configure the lexer pattern for titles at runtime (in case a given spelling of PhD is not detected as a title) and secondly we will probably need to add more grammar rules to allow for more variations of where the title can be placed. Will take a look at this now.

[bl00513]

@inukshuk Is this issue closed? It appears to have been covered in an earlier PR.

[inukshuk]

IIRC the parser will still not accept the example above, because it will need additional grammar rules, so let's leave it open while that's still the case.

[drwl]

Is it not resolved by https://github.com/inukshuk/namae/blob/master/spec/namae/parser_spec.rb#L97 ?

[inukshuk]

@drwl no those specs just test the tokenizer. The tokenizer is not that critical, because you can just update the title patterns at runtime anyway. But some title-usage requires new grammar rules. I added some specs here but they won't pass yet unless I'm forgetting something.

Happy to merge a PR if someone would like to take a stab at this.

[jachwe]

I'd also be very interested in a fix for this.

[jachwe]

As a workaround: If you add PhD to the list of titles e.g. :suffix => /\s*\b(JR|Jr|jr|SR|Sr|sr|[IVX]{2,}|PhD|Phd)(\.|\b)/,
then the name is parsed correctly. Only downside is that the PhD is recognised as suffix instead of a title. But at least parsing works.