She has a database full of names that follow no specific format, that she needs to seperate down to [title, first name, middle initial, last name]

Welcome to the administrative sub-basement of hell. Depending on the names your friend has to deal with, you might discover that a regex can handle 98%, but that the remaining 2% will cause you to run screaming into the night.

Consider my dear friend   Lt. Col. J. Random von Perl-Hacker III By the scheme your friend is using, Randy's name needs to reduce to   <Lt. Col.> <J.> <R.> <von Perl-Hacker> (And it isn't immediately clear what to do with the "III".) In any large set of unstructured names, you're going to run into a few like this. Good luck doing handling them with a single regexp.

I think you'll have better luck breaking the name into tokens, providing predicate functions that answer whether a token can be of a particular type, then providing a set of "rules" to match a set of tokens against. This will be slower, but potentially much more accurate, than a regex.

In reply to Re: regex: seperating parts of non-formatted names by dws
in thread regex: seperating parts of non-formatted names by emilford

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