/name-cleaver

Parser and standardizer for politician, individual and organization names.

Primary LanguagePython

This is the name parser and standardizer for the datacommons project.
It now supports politician, individual and organization names.

Installation
============

Installation is easy:

    pip install name-cleaver

Usage
=====

Basic usage is the same for each type of name, just import the relevant NameCleaver class from one of:

* `PoliticianNameCleaver`
* `IndividualNameCleaver`
* `OrganizationNameCleaver`

Example:

    from name_cleaver import PoliticianNameCleaver
    smith = PoliticianNameCleaver('Smith, Robert J').parse()
    
    smith.first => "Robert"
    smith.middle => "J."
    smith.last => "Smith"

    print str(smith) => "Robert J. Smith"

Usage as above can usually be expected to return a Name object, but is not guaranteed to not throw an exception if NameCleaver is given unexpected input or otherwise can't figure out what to do with a name. You can look for and handle Name Cleaver's `UnparseableNameException` class. If you don't want to deal with handling exceptions, NameCleaver has a safe mode:

    smith = PoliticianNameCleaver('Smith, Robert J').parse(safe=True)

In safe mode, if NameCleaver encounters an exception or doesn't come up with a fully-formed name, it will return the original input string.