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Comment by evolve2k | Hacker News Reader

Yes assume I have a Family name field and a Given Name field, the question is how to display them in the right order.

Im considering having a select field next to the name something like

Name Order: "Western style", "Eastern style"

Name Order: "Given Name, Family Name", "Family name, Given Name"

With a bit of extra work I can detect the country set a default for this field, while allowing users in places like Pakistan to still get the display order they want.

But I've never seen it done this way before, hence my curiosity to ask everyone.

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Country isn’t adequate; different parts of India use different conventions. To list the two states I’m most familiar with: West Bengal is mostly “Given Family” <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_name>, while Telangana largely uses “F. Given” (family name normally abbreviated, in my experience; the initial can also be more than one Latin letter for some Telugu consonants, mostly “Ch.”, and can be initials for more than one word) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telugu_names>.

Seriously, just avoid splitting name fields if you can help it. Do you absolutely have to have split names? Begrudgingly do so and acknowledge things will never be right for everyone. But if not, just don’t (and don’t make the mistake of assuming a format in order to do things like surname sorting—with a unified field you simply can’t do surname sorting).

Minor thing, don’t call it “Western style” or “Eastern style”. I’m not sure what the correct term is.

There are plenty of Asian countries that don’t follow last name - first name so it’s not necessarily an “eastern” thing.

another opinion from me about automating based on country. It’s a cool thing to implement but might not be worth the effort.

An example I have is in the Philippines, majority of people go First Name Last Name. However, there’s a Chinese sub population that has last name first name. But then most of this sub population also have “Christian” names that they use in Most official documents or websites. I’m pretty sure other countries will also have similar nuances.

Maybe a screen name or username will be the razor.

As others have mentioned, this is impossible to get right -- for the simple reason that there is no consistent order -- not for the same country, the same geographic area, the same culture, or any other marker you can possibly think of.

Example: in Malaysia and Singapore, Chinese people can have traditional Chinese names -- SAA for surname and 2 characters that's their "given name" so to speak. Some have an English name -- but it's written ESAA. Some only have one character names, so it's ESA. Some surnames have 2 characters, so ESSA/ESSAA.

When filling out US forms, ESAA usually turns into Englishname Surname, and SAA turns into Givenname Surname. So the display order for the first is firstlast, but the second is lastfirst. Same country, same culture, different display order depending on whether their parents gave them English names or they chose one later in life.

When there's a middle name field, often ESAA names turns into E AA S - first middle last. This display order is wrong. It should be first last middle.

As you can see, even within the same country, same culture, same neighbourhood, you still don't have a consistent order. It's simply not possible to do this in a consistent way.

What have you seen as best examples of interfaces that support your local context.

Anyone ideas beyond throw everything together in one long field.

Part of what’s lost with this approach is you then don’t really know which part is which. Aka loss of semantic clarity.

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