“last name, first name” -> “first name last name” in serialized strings

Question

I have a bunch of strings that contain lists of names in last name, first name format, separated by commas, like so:

names <- c(\'Beaufoy         


        

Answer 1

(1) Maintain same names in each element This can be done with a single gsub (assuming there are no commas within names):

> gsub("([^, ][^,]*), ([^,]+)", "\\2 \\1", names)
[1] "Simon Beaufoy, Danny Boyle"       "Christopher Nolan"               
[3] "Stuart Blumberg, Lisa Cholodenko" "David Seidler"                   
[5] "Aaron Sorkin"    

> gsub("([^, ][^,]*), ([^,]+)", "\\2 \\1", "Hoover, J. Edgar")
[1] "J. Edgar Hoover"

(2) Separate into one name per element If you wanted each first name last name in a separate element then use (a) scan

scan(text = out, sep = ",", what = "")

where out is the result of the gsub above or to get it directly try (b) strapply:

> library(gsubfn)
> strapply(names, "([^, ][^,]*), ([^,]+)", x + y ~ paste(y, x), simplify = c)
[1] "Simon Beaufoy"     "Danny Boyle"       "Christopher Nolan"
[4] "Stuart Blumberg"   "Lisa Cholodenko"   "David Seidler"    
[7] "Aaron Sorkin"     

> strapply("Hoover, Edgar J.", "([^, ][^,]*), ([^,]+)", x + y ~ paste(y, x), 
+   simplify = c)
[1] "Edgar J. Hoover"

Note that all examples above used the same regular expression for matching.

UPDATE: removed comma separating first and last name.

UPDATE: added code to separate out each first name last name into a separate element in case that is the preferred output format.