Oh my god names are so, so, difficult to deal with. I'm doing something where I get information / stats about players from different sites, and it's like all of them have different names. For example:

  Joseph Smith     // nice and generic
  Joseph Smith Jr. // gotta make sure we tell people he's the son of another Joseph Smith
  Joseph Smith Jr  // psh, we don't use periods!
  Jose Smith       // if from a different country, some sites keep their native name
  José Smith       // yup, sometimes accents are kept
  Joe Smith        // nicknames, all about those.
  Joey Smith       // kid nickname, sure
  Jos� Smith      // literally even had to deal with a site that had unknown unicode letters
  Juan Jose Smith  // sometimes, people go by their middle names, but some sites like to use their full name instead
  Juan Smith       // remember how some people go by their middle names? Maybe a site only gives you their first and last

How, how in the world is someone supposed to go through and match all those names with each other in a somewhat quick manner? I can't imagine it's fully solved because there'll always be other cases.

I've tried a couple ways, like removing periods and accents, removing "Jr", "Sr", "III", removing all vowels even. And then went further and tried some of the string matching libraries that return a number with how close words are to each other. That would help cases where Joe, Joey, Joseph would come back quite close, but then I'd run into the issue of a "Darren Smith" and "Darek Smith" would come back so similar the computer thought they were the same person.

In cases like names, that Patrick writes about here, yeah, they're almost impossible to get right and it ends up being mostly by hand, which is fine since I can get it correct, but eats up so much time.