From a JSON object

When the data is already labelled — say, a form payload or a database row — pass it in as an object and skip the order-and-separator guessing entirely:

import { Namefully } from 'namefully';

new Namefully({
  firstName: 'Jane',
  lastName: 'Doe',
});

new Namefully({
  prefix: 'Dr',
  firstName: 'Jane',
  middleName: 'Marie',
  lastName: 'Doe',
  suffix: 'PhD',
});

Every key is optional except firstName and lastName. The valid keys are: prefix, firstName, middleName, lastName, suffix.

Hierarchical first/last names

When a first or last name has multiple parts, you can use the hierarchical form:

new Namefully({
  firstName: { value: 'Jane', more: ['Marie', 'Louise'] },
  lastName:  { father: 'De La Cruz', mother: 'García' },
});

The shorthand still works — firstName: 'Jane' is equivalent to firstName: { value: 'Jane' }, and lastName: 'Doe' is equivalent to lastName: { father: 'Doe' }. Reach for the hierarchical form only when you actually have the extra parts.

:::info One-way only v1.3.1 accepts this hierarchical shape as input, but cannot serialize a Namefully back out to JSON or reconstruct one from JSON. Full round-trip arrived in v2 — see What's new in v2. :::

Middle names

middleName is a single string. If the person has two middle names, pass them as one string with whatever separator you want them rendered with:

new Namefully({ firstName: 'John', middleName: 'Joe Allen', lastName: 'Smith' });

namefully splits this internally on whitespace and treats each part as a separate middle name. The accessor name.middle always returns a single string, and name.middleName() returns the array.