mjfii/r-nameparser-lib

An R library allowing parsing of surname, first name, and gender based on US census data.

r-nameparser-lib's Issues

object 'census.names' not found

I have been getting the following error:

x <- 'livingston III,  Mr. MICHAEL JOHN9'
parse.names(x)
Error in checkForRemoteErrors(val) : 
  one node produced an error: object 'census.names' not found

It looks like the census.names data frame was not accessible in the clusters. The code failed during parLapply().

After reading this explanation: SimDesign Vignette

I was able to fix it by updating the parse.names() function by loading census.names in the function and exporting it to the clusters with parallel::clusterExport( cl=cl, 'census.names' ). Wanted to share in case others were having this issue.

function (x, ...) 
{
    data("census.names")
    no_cores <- parallel::detectCores() - 1
    cl <- parallel::makeCluster(no_cores)
    parallel::clusterExport( cl=cl, 'census.names' )
    input_names <- data.frame(name = x)
    input_names$parsed_name <- parallel::parLapply(cl, input_names$name, 
        parse.name)
    input_names <- data.frame(input_names$name, do.call("rbind", 
        strsplit(as.character(input_names$parsed_name), "|", 
            fixed = TRUE)), stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
    colnames(input_names) <- c("name", "salutation", "first_name", 
        "middle_name", "last_name", "suffix", "gender", "gender_confidence")
    parallel::stopCluster(cl)
    return(input_names)
}

passing custom prefixes and suffixes to parse.names

To pass custom prefixes and suffixes to parse.name() through the parse.names() function the elipses need to be added to parLapply():

input_names$parsed_name <- parallel::parLapply(cl, input_names$name, 
        parse.name, ...)