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Abbreviations / Abbreviations in personal names - standardise

Purpose: to standardize the format of abbreviations and acronyms so that they either all have full stops or all have spaces.

Example:

A B C D becomes A.B.C.D.

A.B. C. becomes A.B.C. or A.B.C.D. becomes A B C D

A B. C becomes A B C

This process cannot recognize abbreviations which have been entered into the database without either spaces or full stops, such as BBC. As certain countries have prepositions or conjunctions (‘and’) which themselves consist of a single character, standalone characters are not given a full stop with the process Abbreviations - standardise. Thus SILVIO Y DONNA SERVICIOS DE PUBLICIDAD SA remains unchanged. However, the process Abbreviations in personal names - standardise does give a full stop to standalone characters, and should be run over fields containing personal names, so that initials can be correctly formatted. With this process, Mr T Smith would become Mr T. Smith.

Information required: For each country chosen, you are required to specify whether you want to give all abbreviations full stops, or to replace the existing full stops with spaces. You are assumed to require the same format for all fields. If this is not the case, run this process twice over the data: once for those fields requiring full stops and once for those fields requiring spaces.