Challenge 2 - Title Casing Surnames

Danny Roden
Danny Roden Administrator
edited June 5 in Challenges

Does it bother you when you get mail through the letter box and your name is not presented with ‘standard’ casing? I did some work with a charity a few years ago and this was something they got a surprisingly high number of calls regarding. Long story short, they had a free-text form that their call center staff used to enter their donors contact info and no standardization routines in place as such they had all sorts of different ways names were being entered.

For most names, like mine, the fix is easy as you just need to apply a Title casing standardistion routine to your data (i.e. ‘roden’ becomes ‘Roden’, or ‘SMITH’ becomes ‘Smith’). However, there are several notable exceptions where simply capitalizing only the first character of each word isn’t going to give you the right result.

This week’s challenge is to use Aperture Data Studio to build a routine that corrects the below list of names into a format that the recipients would be happy with (taking into account double-barrel names, Irish and Scottish names (e.g. O'Neil & McDonald) as well as those where the customer has provided the ‘correct’ form of the name to begin with, e.g. 'DeFazio').

The sample data for this challenge is below (note: it only contains 13x examples)

When you've figured it out, please post your solution here.

Your solution should include a screenshot (or a video walk-through) of your results. Please also include the .dmx file containing your solution and a brief description of the approach you took.