Introduction

We all take our names for granted and yet there is so much information in it. Your name reveals a lot of information about who you are. It tells if you're a man or a women, what language you speak and it even reveals your nationality.

Validating a phone number, zip code or email address is simple. You don’t need a parsing service for that. But parsing a name and getting information out of it is much harder. That is where we come in: Name Parser is an API service that splits a complete name into useful information such as first name, last name, gender and nationality.

Examples

Names can be written in different formats. This makes it complicated for developers to check if a given name is valid or not. Our software can parse many different name formats. The table below shows a a few examples:

Types Format Example
Regular names. [first name] [last name] Jennifer Anderson
Names with middle name. [first name] [middle name] [last name] Stephanie Karen Hills
Last name first. [last name], [first name] [middle name] Procházka, Lukáš Michal
Names with salutation and initials. [salutation] [first name] [initial] [last name] Mr Bob S. Samuels
Title with last name first. [title] [last name], [first name] Dr. Jenkins, Philip
Nickname between [], (), {} or "". [first name] [nickname] [last name] Stephanie "DJ" Williams
Cyrillic, Greek and Latin characters. [first name] [last name] Екатерина Иванов

Use cases

Name Parser is a blazing fast RESTful API that returns JSON objects. It is easy to integrate into any existing or new platform. Names are a very common field in most online forms, databases and processes. To get an idea of the possibilities of our API we listed a few typical use cases.

1) Simplify forms

Almost all business websites contain a form where a visitor can enter his name. On average forms have five different text inputs like: first name, last name, salutation, email and country. Using our name parsing endpoint you can bring that back by 60% and even get more information. Instead of a user having to fill five fields, a visitor only has to enter his complete name and email address.

  • Shorten contact, registration and order forms by 60%
  • Get more conversions (people don't like to fill in long forms)
  • Get more information out of your form like gender and nationality
2) Validate forms

Do you have a website where people can sign up, order or submit a question via a contact form? You can use our name validation endpoint to check if a name exists, is not made up or misspelled. In addition the validation endpoint also detects if a name is possibly fake by comparing it with 13.738 famous, fictional and humorous names.

  • Make sure you get high quality sign-ups
  • Validate if a name is not fake
  • Check if a name is is not misspelled
3) Clean up your existing customer database

Do you already have an existing database with customer names? Use our name parsing endpoint to flag misspelled or fake names an enrich your database with additional customer information. Our paid plans offer the possibility to process a high volume of names in a short time.

  • Validate your customer names
  • Detect misspelled and fake names
  • Get the right salutation for your emails and other communication
  • Enrich your database with your customers gender, possible nationality
4) Generate fictional names for your development databases

In most cases when you develop software, apps or web projects you work with names of customers. For new projects you can generate fictional accounts including the salutation, gender and country details. The endpoint is not only useful for new projects but also for existing projects. Instead of having a development database with real names it's more secure to work with fictional names instead. Use our name generator endpoint to generate a database with fictional names for any country code.

  • Generate fictional user accounts (name, gender, country) for new projects
  • Improve the security of your applications by developing with fictional names
5) Extract names from text

Do you want extract names from news articles, form messages or web pages? Use our name extraction endpoint to extract complete names from any given text.

  • Extract names from news articles or social media posts for automated tagging
  • Extract names from web pages like "About us" or "Meet the Team".
  • Search and replace extracted names from emails to mask names for GDPR compliance.

Changelog

We always keep on improving our service. We divided the changelog in a section for the API and for the database. Our API returns the version of the API and database via the response headers. You can use the versions from the response header to programmatically detect if we release a new version.

API
Version Date Changes
1.4 13-11-2020
  • Added the name extraction endpoint to the API to extract names from text.
  • Created database with common keywords in every supported language to reduce false possive names for extraction endpoint.
  • Examined and improved complete API to meet strict GDPR regulations.
1.3 30-09-2020
  • All endpoints don't try to parse (obvious) rubbish names anymore.
  • Added additional status codes for when names could not be found (404).
  • Improved the rate limiting functionality excluding error responses.
  • Added additional hourly and daily usage fields to account information endpoint.
  • Parse and Validation endpoints accept different orders for first and last name like: last name, first name first name or last name first name.
1.2 01-06-2020
  • Added rate limiting based upon subscription plan.
  • Improved the name parser so it can detect multiple middle names.
  • Increased accuracy of nationality prediction using new algorithm
  • Updated the structure of the result object to a more logical model.
  • Added support for IP addresses to Country Code using MaxMind GeoLite2.
  • Added Pantheon and IMDB data files for loose and strict validation.
1.1 24-09-2019
  • Fixed salutation breaking after a title.
  • Added the detection of nicknames that are written like: (nickname), [nickname] or "nickname".
  • Added the following endpoints to the API: account information, validation and name generation.
1.0 17-08-2019
  • Released first version of the API.
Database
Version Date Changes
7 07-10-2020
  • Updated countries RU in the gender database.
  • Created a lastname table to import all official lastnames.
  • Added all supported countries to lastname database.
  • In the countries RU, PL, CZ the lastname also indicates the gender.
  • Updated firstname database for countries CA, RU, PL, IT, CH with additional names.
6 31-08-2020
  • Exported 10.187.493 public profiles to rebuilt the first name database resulting in 122 countries.
  • Improved performance of cron jobs that collect public profiles.
  • Fixed the Russian first names entries.
5 05-05-2020
  • Names from unsupported countries are now added and based upon first names from supported countries resulting in 110 countries.
  • Started measuring and tracking nationality prediction performance by using open database with names and countries from 29,216 olympic athletes.
  • Updated country tables with additional country information.
  • Added countries HU, SI, SK, IN, RU and UA.
4 26-12-2019
  • Added column country_rank to name tables to support nationality prediction.
  • Added countries AR, BR, AU, NZ, CZ, ES, FR, GR, PL, TR to the gender database.
3 22-10-2019
  • Updated tables, now including frequency of names.
  • Added additional table for ASCII version of each name.
  • Added countries AT, CA, DK, IT, NO, IE, CH, PT to the gender database.
2 02-09-2019
  • Released first version of the database.
  • Converted whole database to UTF-8 when importing name databases.
  • Added countries NL, SE, DE, FI, BE, US, GB to the gender database.
1 17-08-2019
  • Released first version of the database.