Actually, part of the problem seems to be your input data. Both 'name' and 'advisor' can consist of more than one name according to your example. Which raises the question: are the names always of the form 'lastname, firstname middlename'? What if a person has no middle name or more than one? In any case I don't see that your regex covers that.

Since this is a homework assignment, you probably can't change the input data (which is what I would normally do - use a separator like ':' to delimit the fields), so the way to go is probably:

- split at blanks (use  @a = /([\w-,@]+\s+)/)

- check which fields terminate in ',' - these are the last names of the person and his advisor

- check how many fields are between the person's last name and the advisor's last name and how many after the advisor's last name to find out how many first / middle names were given in each case

Hope this helps you,

pike