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in reply to Re^2: Split first and last names
in thread Split first and last names

we need to use both their full name (in an email to field perhaps or on the front of an envelope) but just their firstname in the salutation

Bod, though I know nothing of your (superb) business, it won't stop me from offering some free advice.

If you're politely allowing them to enter anything their heart desires in the "Your Name" field -- and further assuming you're not being overwhelmed by a huge volume of registrations -- how about simply storing their preferred "Your Name" in your database ... and then later manually editing your new registrations, checking for goofs (and rude Turkish words) ... but also to manually enter a nice "salutation" field.

Parsing human names is one niche where I suspect humans still outperform computers, as I discovered years ago when my company sent out a letter to "Dear Captain Cruises" after the computer program incorrectly derived a salutation from Captain Cook Cruises. :-)

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Re^4: Split first and last names
by Bod (Parson) on Dec 01, 2022 at 19:32 UTC
    offering some free advice

    Free advice is always welcome. And given the giver, it will be taken very seriously...

    Your suggestion seems the most sensible. There are occasions when we get upwards of 100 new registrations in a day but those are very rare days. So the volume of data could easily be manually verified. The only issue being an automated email immediately after registration in many cases. Perhaps I need to anonymise that one.

    It's actually more complex still because we hold people's pets' names in our database and send some emails as Dear Eyespop and Fido. Plus, we add the dog's name into the body content. But it has to make sense when the name is present and when it is missing.