Parse a company name and legal suffix in C#

Separate a company’s base name from its legal form and trading name.

dotnet add package RecursiveAI.OneContact

Requires .NET 10 (net10.0); .NET 9 and earlier aren’t supported.

using RecursiveAI.OneContact;
var company = CompanyName.Parse(
    "Acme Limited", Region.Parse("GB"));
Console.WriteLine(company.Base);
Console.WriteLine(
    company.LegalForm?.Abbreviation);

Acme
Ltd

CompanyName.Parse throws ContactParseException for rejected input; an ambiguous legal form can still parse, with an empty ELF code (the ISO 20275 legal-form code) and multiple candidates.

Unzip the example, then dotnet run.

Variations

Read the leading article and trading name separately:

using RecursiveAI.OneContact;
var company = CompanyName.Parse(
    "The Acme Limited d/b/a Acme Shop",
    Region.Parse("GB"));
Console.WriteLine(company.LeadingArticle);
Console.WriteLine(company.Base);
Console.WriteLine(company.TradingAs);

The
Acme
Acme Shop

Related recipes

• Parse one person’s name

The short answer

Use CompanyName.Parse(text, country) and read Base and LegalForm. The snippet at the top separates Acme Limited into Acme and the canonical abbreviation Ltd, with an explicit British country hint. Keep the source text alongside those fields: parsing a written legal form does not establish a company’s legal identity or registration status.

The company-name documentation describes a rules-based parser backed by the compiled GLEIF legal-form list. It does not complete or correct the base name. A country hint narrows the legal-form candidates; it is context you supply, not a country discovered from a registry lookup.

What is the suffix for a company name?

For this task, it is the legal-form text at the end of a company name, such as Limited. The parser looks for the longest matching form at the end rather than deleting the last word. This matters for composite forms, which the documentation says are kept as typed. It can also recognize certain prefix abbreviations, so a legal form does not always occupy the final position.

Read LegalForm.Text when you need the spelling supplied by the user, and LegalForm.Abbreviation when you need the canonical abbreviation. Canonical is the display form built from the parsed parts. These fields serve different purposes: storing only the abbreviation loses the original wording, while storing only the raw input makes it harder to compare structured parts.

How do I parse a company name’s legal suffix in C#?

Supply the jurisdiction when you know it. The example uses Region.Parse("GB"); do not substitute the computer’s locale for known company context. A hinted country restricts candidates to that country’s rows when it has matching rows. If it has none, the detailed result reports that the legal form lies outside the hinted country.

Inspect LegalForm.Candidates and LegalForm.ElfCode before treating a form as resolved. The code is set only when exactly one distinct code remains. Several candidates produce an empty code and the information issue company.legal-form-ambiguous. A successful parse is therefore not the same as a uniquely identified legal form. An absent legal form is also different from an ambiguous one: check for null before reading it.

How do company suffixes differ by country?

The same written abbreviation can occur in several jurisdictions. A global suffix-removal list cannot retain that distinction. The parser keeps each candidate’s country, code, name and active status, rather than inventing a unique code from an abbreviation alone. Short forms also have special matching rules: forms of at most two letters need capitals, real dotted letters or a country hint.

The variation separates The and Acme Shop from the base name. Trading-as markers such as d/b/a are not legal forms. Likewise, a comma between words remains part of the name, while a comma immediately before a legal form does not. Use these structured parts instead of trimming arbitrary punctuation or removing every occurrence of a legal-form word inside the base name.