in reply to regex: seperating parts of non-formatted names

A good approach to programming problems in general is "breaking the problem into pieces". This is true for regular expressions in general. So I'd start writing the main regexp like that:

$name = qr{($title)?\W+($first)?\W+($middle)?\W+($last)};

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And now you define each of the variables on their own, of course above this declaration.

#the title shall be extensible, ok
my @titles = qw/LTC COL DR MS MR MISS/;
my $title = join('|',@titles);
$title = qr[(?:$title)\.]i; #case-insensitive match

# first name: no restrictions?
my $first = qr[\w+];

# middle initial
my $middle = qr{(?:\s*[A-Z]\.)+};

# last name: no restrictions?
my $last = qr[\w+];

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Any more details should be nop big problem. HTH to <cite>enlighten of the powers of perl</cite> :)

update: untested, there may be more mistakes...

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