Enhanced export for "merge contacts with same address" - family names

Enhancements to ‘Merge contacts with same address’ Export option:

Working with several groups, I have consistently found they request this enhancement to this export option. Basically, it comes down to names:

Currently, if a couple lives at the same address, and the ‘merge contacts with same address’ functionality is used, their merged addressee field come out as a list of names separated by commas: “Jane Smith, Henry Smith” . These are actually the individual addressee fields of the contacts, so they could also be “Dr. Jane Smith, Mr. Henry Smith III” ( I am going to take the simplistic case where we are NOT using prefixes suffixes).

Wouldn’t it be better if it were exported like : “Jane & Henry Smith”, if they had the same last name; or if different last names, it would need to be “Jane Smith & Henry Jones”

Likewise, in the Postal Greeting, I prefer concatenating the names with “&” rather than “,” . I this patch, to produce a

To do this, it compares the last_name of the ‘master’ contact and the ‘copy’ contact. If they are the same, it prepends the first_name field + & of the ‘copy’ contact onto the master contact addressee field, so you get ‘Jane & ’ . ‘Henry Smith’. It also produces a 'postal greeting' export that includes the postal_greeting field of the master contact + the first_name field of the copy contact: 'Jane & Henry' ( I just left off any 'Dear..' terminology, to be included downstream.)

The attached patch does just this; but I’m not convinced it should be implemented for core Civi. For one thing, using the default Addressee format, which includes prefixes and suffixes, it will break the display, ending with things like “Jane & Mr. Henry Smith” (It won’t include ‘Dr. Jane’ even if she has that prefix).

So it works well as long as your Addressee format is plain-jane

{contact.first_name} { } {contact.last_name} ; and your postal greeting format is {contact.first_name}

Any customized addressee format in the ‘copy’ contact won’t be presented in the Addressee field- it will just be that contacts first name.