People's names (was Re: sqlite3 error)

[John J. Lee]

"John Machin" <sjmachin at lexicon.net> writes:
[...]
> This is all a bit OT.  Before we close the thread down

Do you have a warrant for that?

> , let me leave
> you with one warning:
> Beware of enthusiastic maintenance programmers on a mission to clean up
> the dirty names in your database:
> E.g. (1) "Karim bin Md" may not appreciate getting a letter addressed
> to "Dr Karim Bin" (Md is an abbreviation of Muhammad).
> E.g. (2) Billing job barfs on a customer who has no given names and no
> family name. Inspection reveals that he is over-endowed in the title
> department: "Mr Earl King".
[...]

Heh.

I guess the people who really know about that kind of thing are the
"record linkage" people (this one is a project worked on by c.l.py's
own Tim Churches, and has produced some Python code):

http://datamining.anu.edu.au/projects/linkage.html


John