How to use PersonNameComponentsFormatter

Foundation framework available for iOS, macOS, iPadOS, and other Apple platforms hides many gems that you can use to simplify operations required in nearly every application. One of the very often used sets of features are formatters. You probably are familiar with DateFormatters, but in today’s article, I’ll describe how to use PersonNameComponentsFormatter, which you can use to parse and format a person’s name.

The structure of personal names varies between different locales. On the other hand, there are significant and meaningful for persons that use them. That’s a reason you should treat them with respect and very carefully. PersonNameComponentsFormatter can help you with that. This formatter can parse string data provided and separated them into PersonNameComponents, and get that structure to display name using the correct locale.

First, you have to create an instance of the PersonNameComponentsFormatter:

let formatter = PersonNameComponentsFormatter()

To separate name string for components use personNameComponents(from:) function:

if let components = formatter.personNameComponents(
    from: "Sir David Frederick Attenborough"
) {
    print(components)
    /* Prints:
       namePrefix: Sir
       givenName: David
       middleName: Frederick
       familyName: Attenborough
    */
}

If you already have components (for example, created from the form data), you can use them with the same class to build different data representations. You can use one of 4 styles short, medium(default), long, abbreviated.

formatter.style = .default
print(formatter.string(from: components))
// David Attenborough

formatter.style = .abbreviated
print(formatter.string(from: components))
// DA

formatter.style = .long
print(formatter.string(from: components))
// Sir David Frederick Attenborough

formatter.style = .medium
print(formatter.string(from: components))
// David Attenborough

formatter.style = .short
print(formatter.string(from: components))
// David

Additionally, PersonNameComponentsFormatter can prepare an Attributed String.

As you can see, PersonNameComponentsFormatter is very easy to use. With correctly collected or parsed data, you will create correct abbreviations or long-style formatted person details.