human-name-rb

Ruby bindings for the Rust crate human_name, a library for parsing and comparing human names.

See the human_name docs for details.

Examples

  require 'humanname'

  doe_jane = HumanName.parse("Doe, Jane")
  doe_jane.surname
  => "Doe"
  doe_jane.given_name
  => "Jane"
  doe_jane.initials
  => "J"

  j_doe = HumanName.parse("J. Doe")
  j_doe.surname
  => "Doe"
  j_doe.given_name
  => nil
  j_doe.initials
  => "J"

  j_doe == doe_jane
  => true
  j_doe == HumanName.parse("John Doe")
  => true
  doe_jane == HumanName.parse("John Doe")
  => false

Supported environments

Without modification, 64-bit Linux or OS X 10.9+. Depends on a .so or .dylib dynamic library built on Travis' container infrastructure, which means Ubuntu 12.04 or OS X 10.9.5.

In theory, anywhere where the nightly Rust compiler will run. First, build your own libhuman_name.so (or libhuman_name.dylib on OS X):

curl -s https://static.rust-lang.org/rustup.sh | sh -s -- --channel=nightly
git clone git@github.com:djudd/human-name.git
cd human-name
cargo build --release

Then, fork this repo (djudd/human-name-rb), replace libhuman_name.so with the file from human-name/target/release, and run bundle exec rake to ensure the specs are passing.

Depends on the ffi gem.

Benchmark results

Comparing to people, namae, and human_name_parser, on 16k real examples taken mostly from PubMed author fields:

$ bundle exec rake benchmark
people gem:
  2.280000   0.010000   2.290000 (  2.313764)
namae gem:
  2.710000   0.020000   2.730000 (  2.745188)
human_name_parser gem:
  1.640000   0.010000   1.650000 (  1.659007)
this gem:
  0.320000   0.030000   0.350000 (  0.349284)

Our implementation uses a similar strategy to people and human_name_parser but covers significantly more edge cases, and also supports comparison. (human_name_parser also covers fewer edge cases than people, as of December 2015, which probably explains its speed advantage.)

namae uses a formal grammar, unlike this gem, and so probably captures some cases this does not, although it certainly also misses some which this captures.