Email to Name Extraction | Dataford Interview Questions

Given an email column, extract the first name and create a new column.

Asked in the Face-to-face technical round stage.

Implement extract_first_names(emails). For each email, inspect the local part before @. The first name is the text before the earliest ., _, or -. If the local part begins with a separator, preserve the empty first token and also return the token immediately after that separator. Return one flat list in input order.

Input and Output

emails is a list of strings. Return a list of strings.

Constraints

1 <= len(emails) <= 10^4
Each email contains exactly one @ character
Each local part contains letters and may contain ., _, or -
Return values must preserve input order

Function Signature

def extract_first_names(emails):

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