Invert Names

A short note on switching inverted names like last, first to read first last.

Occasionally, we get data frames where items are comma separated and reverse order. Perhaps the most common case is where first and last names are reversed and comma separated. Another, situation is when applying controlled vocabularies, which are often structured in this way (Figure 1). Let’s run through switching the terms and see the result (#tbl-result).

Figure 1: PastPerfect data entry screen showing assignment of Nomenclature 3.0 terms.

# Load libraries
library(dplyr)

Warning: package 'dplyr' was built under R version 4.2.3

library(tidyr)

Warning: package 'tidyr' was built under R version 4.2.3

# Create data
df <- data.frame (name_inverse  = c("Henry, John", 
                      "Bunyan, Paul")
                  )

df <- df |> separate(name_inverse, c("last", "first"),
               remove = FALSE) |> 
  mutate(name = paste(first, last, sep = " "), 
         .before = name_inverse)
df

Table 1: Results showing the reversal of names. Note the extra columns can be removed with select.

name	name_inverse	last	first
John Henry	Henry, John	Henry	John
Paul Bunyan	Bunyan, Paul	Bunyan	Paul

Figure 2: Names fixed