Trailing commas and plantR:::LastName

[ggrittz]

There are some weird cases such as ", Carpenter, CBS. Bissell, CBS." that breaks down the function's logic due to the remaining trailing comma at the beginning of the string. This only happens, however, when the argument invert = TRUE

This is plantR::prepName, which has plantR:::lastName inside

> plantR::prepName('1919, Nichols, Yale. 1908, Clark, CBS, UCONN.; 1908, Carpenter, CBS. 1901 Bissell, CBS.
+ ')
Error in gsub(x, "", y, fixed = TRUE) : padrão de comprimento 0

The error in plantR:::lastName occurs exactly here:

other.names <- mapply(function(x, y) {
      gsub(x, "", y, fixed = TRUE)
    }, last.name, name[!miss.name])

I can solve this by adding a substitution right after if(invert) step:

if (invert) {
    
    ##### My addition to remove the trailing comma #####
    name <- gsub("^,", "", name)
    
    other.names <- mapply(function(x, y) {
      gsub(x, "", y, fixed = TRUE)
    }, last.name, name[!miss.name])

It is also possible to add this gsub right at the beginning of the function, around here:

function (name, noName = "s.n.", invert = FALSE, initials = FALSE, 
          first.capital = TRUE) 
{
  miss.name <- name %in% c("NA", NA, "", " ", noName)
  name <- gsub("[.]", ". ", name, perl = TRUE)
  name <- gsub("\\s+", " ", name, perl = TRUE)
  name <- gsub("^ | $", "", name, perl = TRUE)
  comma <- grepl("\\p{L},", name[!miss.name], perl = TRUE)
  no.first <- !grepl(" ", name[!miss.name], perl = TRUE)
  outros <- !no.first & !comma
  last.name <- name[!miss.name]

It fixes the issue for me, although a bit hard-coded 😜