Extract first letter of the last word in "full name" field.

So first time posting here and my problem is I need to change middle name to middle initial if there is middle name in full name field using python pandas.

for example) 
Keys, Alicia ------> Keys, Alicia 
Keys, Alicia T ----->Keys, Alicia T 
Keys, Alicia Mary -----> Keys, Alicia M 
Pitt, John Paul -----> Pitt, John P 
Pitt, John Paul John --> Pitt, Jon Paul J

So if there is no middle name then keep the full name values, if there is a middle initial then keep the middle initial if there is a middle name then change middle name to middle initial.

I've been playing with string split but I do not have a good way to know how to tackle all the cases.

Any help are appreciated. Thank you!!

CodePudding user response：

Judging strictly by the provided example, you could use the following piece of code, which replaces the last word with its first letter, to transform every string:

def transform(name):
    words = name.split()
    if len(words) < 3:
        return name
    words[-1] = words[-1][0]
    return " ".join(words)

Of course, if the middle name is not the last word of the string, you'd have to find the middle name somehow and use its index instead of -1.

CodePudding user response：

You could do something like this:

# Get the first letter of the last name
def letterofname(name):
   # Separate each word into a list
   words = name.split(' ')
   # Get the last char
   last_name = words[len(words) - 1]
   last_char = last_name[len(list(last_name)) - 1]

   return last_char

CodePudding user response：

Take a regular expression to substitute those last names with their initials. No complex logic there, just a one-liner :) I made an example regex and substitution for you:

See: https://regex101.com/r/s3Z83O/1