Your expression does not work for all names. I hardly consider myself unusual but I'm "Joshua ben Jore". The middle part is specifically lower case. I'm not in your list of references since I haven't written any books, I'm just alerting you that your regex is not sufficient as a name recognizer. Also consider "Natalie Johnson-Lee". There you've got a hyphenated last name which is pretty common. This is what I thought of on the spot - I'm sure you can come up with more. [update Apparently you address this elsewhere. My bad]

You probably need to set the locale. I don't really understand the locale system having never used it but I'd like to refer you to perllocale as a starting place.

Seeking Green geeks in Minnesota