Replace lowercase in names, not in surnames - r

Question

I have a problem with a database with names of persons. I want to put the names in abbreviation but not the last names. The last name is separated from the name by a comma and the different people are separated from each other by a semicolon, like this example:
Michael, Jordan; Bird, Larry;
If the name is a single word, the code would be like this:
breve$autor <- str_replace_all(breve$autor, "[:lower:]{1,}\\;", ".\\;")
Result with this code:
Michael, J.; Bird, L.;
The problem is in compound names. With this code, the name:
Jordan, Michael Larry;
It would be:
Jordan, Michael L.;
Could someone tell me how to remove all lowercase letters that are between the comma and the semicolon? and it will look like this:
Jordan, M.L.;

Answer 1

Here is another solution:
x1 <- 'Michael, Jordan; Bird, Larry;'
x2 <- 'Jordan, Michael Larry;'
gsub('([A-Z])[a-z]+(?=[ ;])', '\\1.', x1, perl = TRUE)
# [1] "Michael, J.; Bird, L.;"
gsub('([A-Z])[a-z]+(?=[ ;])', '\\1.', x2, perl = TRUE)
# [1] "Jordan, M. L.;"
Surnames are followed by , while are parts of the names are followed by or ;. Here I use (?=[ ;]) to make sure that the following character after the pattern to be matched is a space or a semicolon.
To remove the space between M. and L., an additional step is needed:
gsub('\\. ', '.', gsub('([A-Z])[a-z]+(?=[ ;])', '\\1.', x2, perl = TRUE))
# [1] "Jordan, M.L.;"

Answer 2

There must be a regular expression that will do this, of course. But that magic is a little beyond me. So here is an approach with simple string manipulation in a data frame using tidyverse functions.
library(stringr)
library(dplyr)
library(tidyr)
ballers <- "Michael, Jordan; Bird, Larry;"
mj <- "Jordan, Michael Larry"
c(ballers, mj) %>%
#split the players
str_split(., ";", simplify = TRUE) %>%
# remove white space
str_trim() %>%
#transpose to get players in a column
t %>%
#split again into last name and first + middle (if any)
str_split(",", simplify = TRUE) %>%
# convert to a tibble
as_tibble() %>%
# remove more white space
mutate(V2=str_trim(V2)) %>%
# remove empty rows (these can be avoided by different manipulation upstream)
filter(!V1 == "") %>%
# name the columns
rename("Last"=V1, "First_two"=V2) %>%
# separate the given names into first and middle (if any)
separate(First_two,into=c("First", "Middle"), sep=" ",) %>%
# abbreviate to first letter
mutate(First_i=abbreviate(First, 1)) %>%
# abbreviate, but take into account that middle name might be missing
mutate(Middle_i=ifelse(!is.na(Middle), paste0(abbreviate(Middle, 1), "."), "")) %>%
# combine the First and middle initals
mutate(Initials=paste(First_i, Middle_i, sep=".")) %>%
# make the desired Last, F.M. vector
mutate(Final=paste(Last, Initials, sep=", "))
# A tibble: 3 x 7
Last First Middle First_i Middle_i Initials Final
<chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr>
1 Michael Jordan NA J "" J. Michael, J.
2 Jordan Michael Larry M L. M.L. Jordan, M.L.
3 Bird Larry NA L "" L. Bird, L.
Warning message:
Expected 2 pieces. Missing pieces filled with `NA` in 2 rows [1, 3].
Much longer than a regex.

Answer 3

There will probably be a better way to do this, but I managed to get it to work using the stringr and tibble packages.
library(stringr)
library(tibble)
names <- 'Jordan, Michael; Bird, Larry; Obama, Barack; Bush, George Walker'
df <- as_tibble(str_split(unlist(str_split(names, '; ')), ', ', simplify = TRUE))
df[, 2] <- gsub('[a-z]+', '.', pull(df[, 2]))
This code generates the tibble df, which has the following contents:
# A tibble: 4 x 2
V1 V2
<chr> <chr>
1 Jordan M.
2 Bird L.
3 Obama B.
4 Bush G. W.
The names are first split into first and last names and stored into a data frame so that the gsub() call does not operate on the last names. Then, gsub() searches for any lowercase letters in the last names and replaces them with a single .
Then, you can call str_c(str_c(pull(df[, 1]), ', ', pull(df[, 2])), collapse = '; ') (or str_c(pull(unite(df, full, c('V1', 'V2'), sep = ', ')), collapse = '; ') if you already have the tidyr package loaded) to return the string "Jordan, M.; Bird, L.; Obama, B.; Bush, G. W.".
...also, did you mean Michael Jordan, not Jordan Michael? lol

Answer 4

Here's one that uses gsub twice. The inner one is for names with no middle names and the outer is for names that have a middle name.
x = c("Michael, Jordan; Jordan, Michael Larry; Bird, Larry;")
gsub(", ([A-Z])[a-z]+ ([A-Z])[a-z]+;", ", \\1.\\2.;", gsub(", ([A-Z])[a-z]+;", ", \\1.;", x))
#[1] "Michael, J.; Jordan, M.L.; Bird, L.;"