Extract different variations of hyphenated personal names with regex - regex

Question

I need to extract names after titles but I need to include hyphenated names too which can come in different variations.
The script below fails to pick up hyphenated names.
text = 'This is the text where Lord Lee-How and Sir Alex Smith are mentioned.\
Dame Ane Paul-Law is mentioned too. And just Lady Ball.'
names = re.compile(r'(Lord|Baroness|Lady|Baron|Dame|Sir) ([A-Z][a-z]+)[ ]?([A-Z][a-z]+)?')
names_with_titles = list(set(peers.findall(text)))
print(names_with_titles)
The current output is:
[('Lord', 'Lee', ''), ('Sir', 'Alex', 'Smith'), ('Dame', 'Ane', 'Paul'), ('Lady', 'Ball', '')]
The desired output should be:
[('Lord', 'Lee-How', ''), ('Sir', 'Alex', 'Smith'), ('Dame', 'Ane', 'Paul-Law'), ('Lady', 'Ball', '')]
I managed to extract hyphenated names with this pattern -
hyph_names = re.compile(r'(Lord|Baroness|Lady|Baron|Dame|Sir) ([A-Z]\w+(?=[\s\-][A-Z])(?:[\s\-][A-Z]\w+)+)')
But I cannot figure out how to combine the two. Will appreciate your help!

Answer 1

You may add a (?:-[A-Z][a-z]+)? optional group to the name part patterns:
(Lord|Baroness|Lady|Baron|Dame|Sir)\s+([A-Z][a-z]+(?:-[A-Z][a-z]+)?)(?:\s+([A-Z][a-z]+(?:-[A-Z][a-z]+)?))?
See the regex demo
Details
(Lord|Baroness|Lady|Baron|Dame|Sir) - one of the titles
\s+ - one or more whitespace chars
([A-Z][a-z]+(?:-[A-Z][a-z]+)?) - a capturing group #1:
[A-Z][a-z]+ - an uppercase letter followed with 1+ lowercase ones
(?:-[A-Z][a-z]+)? - an optional non-capturing group matching a hyphen and then an uppercase letter followed with 1+ lowercase ones
(?:\s+([A-Z][a-z]+(?:-[A-Z][a-z]+)?))? - an optional non-capturing group:
\s+ - 1+ whitespaces
([A-Z][a-z]+(?:-[A-Z][a-z]+)?) - a capturing group #2 with the same pattern as in Group 1.
You may build it in Python 3.7 like
title = r'(Lord|Baroness|Lady|Baron|Dame|Sir)'
name = r'([A-Z][a-z]+(?:-[A-Z][a-z]+)?)'
rx = rf'{title}\s+{name}(?:\s+{name})?'
In older versions,
rx = r'{0}\s+{1}(?:\s+{1})?'.format(title, name)