How It Works

Disclaimer

namefully does not magically guess which part of a person's name is what. It relies actually on how you indicate the name parts' roles so that it can do its magic and save you some quality of time.

You may want to use this library if:

• you've been repeatedly dealing with users' given names and surnames
• you need to occasionally format a name in a particular order, way, or shape
• you keep copy-pasting your name-related business logic for every project
• you're curious about trying new, cool stuff.

A little bit of history

At work, the development team deals with many awesome projects that share some commonalities. To increase development speed and productivity, we build some utilites that can later be exported and reused across other modules or projects (Well, you might have been doing the same too at your workplace).

At some point, I got tasked with doing some workarounds with people's names. That was quite fun. Then, I realized that every time I switch projects and want to sort of do the same, I feel very tempted to copy-paste from my past codebase. I was like, "nahhh! Let me just make it a utility." And voilà! Thus has namefully seen the day.

Good to know

namefully is written in TypeScript although it targets a JavaScript audience. Using TypeScript makes the codebase quite intuitive and easy to scale and maintain. Moreover, it is intended to give you some flexibility in terms of data format/type. You'll discover more about it as you go along with the APIs.

namefully works like a trapdoor. Once a raw data is provided (and validated, if needed), you only focus on shaping the name as you desire. If the name is mistaken, a new instance must be created to continue. In other words, no editing is possible. Remember, this utility's primary objective is to help you handle a person's name.

Name standards

The name standards used for this library are as follows:

[Prefix] Firstname [Middlename] Lastname [Suffix]

The opening [ and closing ] brackets mean that these name parts are optional. In other words, the most basic/typical name case is a name that looks like this: John Smith, where John is the first name and Smith, the last name. Visit this link for more details on name standards.

important

Keep in mind that the order of appearance matters and can be altered through configured parameters, which you will be seeing later on. By default, the order of appearance is as shown above and will be used as a basis for future examples and use cases.

Once imported, all that is required to do is to basically create an instance of Namefully and the rest will follow.

import { Namefully } from 'namefully'

const strName = 'Firstname Lastname' // your name as a simple string

const superName = new Namefully(strName) // stays the same, but with superpowers

Terminologies

As a developer, you might be curious and want to have a look at the core implementation of this library. It is likely that you come across some terminologies that might not make sense to you in the first place. Some of them are:

• Namon: a type of name. There are 5 types:
  • prefix
  • firstname
  • middlename
  • lastname
  • suffix
• Nama: refers to a group of Namon, which I denominate nama (just like in criterion/criteria). For example, joining both firstname and lastname is called a Nama.
• Name: is a class representing a namon (a piece of name as string) with some extra capabilities. For example, you can capitalize a namon, extract its initials, compute summary, and more.
• Fullname: refers to all the 5 name parts (Namon) combined together. Know that all of them may not be defined in some cases.

It may look confusing to you in the beginning, but once you start using it, it'll make sense to you. You can trust me on that.

note

You may wonder why firstname instead of firstName. Good JavaScript programming habits favor camelCase as a naming convention for variables, functions, etc. Actually, I follow the same principle except for the words ending with name, I treat them as if they were part of one word (e.g., username), just like in Linux. And yes, I know for some of you, it might be counter-intuitive 😉.

Ready to embark on this new journey? Buckle up, a great adventure awaits you.

Happy name handling 😄!