On 7 June 2013 01:14, Tim Perry wrote:

Denis' version doesn't work for names containing hyphens or apostrophes. The original works for both.... However, the original explicitly assumes there are always at least two names and gives erroneous data if there are more than two. Output below shows the failure on hyphenated names.

Well, yes, I explicitly did not want to dwell on my (potential) implicit assumptions and just handled the cases that where visible in the problem example or were made explicit by the original poster. Adding additional special behaviour for hypens and apostrophes would be trivial, though, by further modifying the isAlphaOrSpace predicate to include the new special characters. -- Denis Kasak

That would certainly work. I'd be tempted to just use: unwords . words . dropWhile (not . isAlpha) $ "unclean-first unclean-last" Tim On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 4:31 PM, Denis Kasak wrote:

...

On 7 June 2013 01:14, Tim Perry wrote:

...

Denis' version doesn't work for names containing hyphens or apostrophes. The original works for both.... However, the original explicitly assumes

On 7 June 2013 01:21, Denis Kasak wrote: there

...

...

are always at least two names and gives erroneous data if there are more than two. Output below shows the failure on hyphenated names.

Well, yes, I explicitly did not want to dwell on my (potential) implicit assumptions and just handled the cases that where visible in the problem example or were made explicit by the original poster. Adding additional special behaviour for hypens and apostrophes would be trivial, though, by further modifying the isAlphaOrSpace predicate to include the new special characters.

For instance, from a ghci session:

...

let s = " \" John Doe-Smith \" " let (|||) = liftM2 (||) let predicate = isAlpha ||| isSpace ||| (== '-') ||| (== '\'') let fs = unwords . words . takeWhile predicate . dropWhile (not . isAlpha) $ s fs "John Doe-Smith"

-- Denis Kasak

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How about import qualified Data.Text as T import Data.Char let s=" \" John Doe-Smith \" " T.unpack . T.unwords . T.words . T.dropWhileEnd (not. isAlpha) . T.dropWhile (not . isAlpha) . T.pack $ s "John Doe-Smith" Cheers, David. 2013/6/7 Michael Peternell :

Hi,

how about

import Data.Char let input = " 'John Doe-Smith' $" unwords.words $ reverse . dropWhile (not.isAlpha) . reverse $ dropWhile (not.isAlpha) input Result: "John Doe-Smith"

-Michael

Am 07.06.2013 um 00:36 schrieb "Costello, Roger L." :

...

Hi Folks,

I have a string that contains a person's name.

Prior to the person's name there may be some non-alpha characters.

After the person's name there may be some non-alpha characters.

Between the person's first name and last name there should be only one space.

I want to remove the leading and trailing non-alpha characters and remove the extra spaces.

Here is an example string:

s = " \" John Doe \" "

After processing, I should have:

John Doe

Below is my implementation. Is there is a shorter and more efficient implementation?

---------------------------------- import Data.Char import Data.List

s = " \" John Doe \" "

-- remove leading non-alpha characters

t1 = dropWhile (not . isAlpha) s -- returns "John Doe \" "

-- break the string up into a list of words, -- delimited by white space

t2 = words t1 -- returns ["John","Doe","\""]

-- create a string consisting of the first -- name, space, last name

t3 = t2!!0 ++ " " ++ t2!!1 -- returns "John Doe"

-- Put it all together:

t4 = ((words . dropWhile (not . isAlpha)) s)!!0 ++ " " ++ ((words . dropWhile (not . isAlpha)) s)!!1

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