Re: First / Last name Parsing... routines.

is this a one-shot? If so, how many records?

Having done this a couple of times, as one-time conversion steps, my conclusion is that if you are doing a one-shot, the best solution is to present the original field as read only and 3 best-guess fields, all on the last line of the screen. Then have a knowledgeable user just pound through the file one record at a time. If your best guess is right 75% of the time (or nearly so), that user will have the job done quicker than you could code to get from 75% accuracy to 90% accuracy.

My experience is to have the active line presented in the last line of the screen, and have the records scroll up the screen. A scroll bar is nice here because they can inch the file a line at a time if the user wants to back up. Make the subfile read-only on all lines except the line at the bottom of the screen. The reasoning for only one line active is so that the user doesn't have issues with eye conflict and bouncing all over a multi-line screen, S/he just focuses on one line and pounds through the file with amazing speed.

With that solution, and you only looking for best-guess, parsing on spaces will probably do the job for you.

Subfiles have a practical limit of about 2500 records, so your design would need to deal with that issue, but that is trivial, so long as you recognize its there..



On 7/17/2011 3:00 AM, Hatzenbeler, Tim wrote:

Does anybody have a link or procedure they are willing to share?

I have a field that contains a name (ie: first mi last or first last or a ton of every variation you can think of) But I need it broken out in 3 fields first mi lastname.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks, Tim

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