I can't agree enough.
You will save yourself brain hurt by tokenizing first, so at least you have some idea where the word boundaries are in some reliable way. Then you need the predicate functions, as the previous poster pointed out.
Perhaps the following snippet makes sense: 
sub parse_names
  @uncategorized = tokenize($erstwhile_name);
  push (@titleToks, shift @uncategorized)
    until ( not is_title($uncategorized[0])
            or not @uncategorized );
  if (not @uncategorized) {
    warn "all titles!";
    return;
  }
  push (@nameToks, shift @uncategorized)
     until ( not is_name($uncategorized[0])
             or not @uncategorized );
  # now probably want to break up @nameToks into first and 
  # last names; this probably involves specific lists like 
  # "van" and "von" and "de" so you attach "de Sade", "van 
  # Gogh" to the last name, but "Robert Louis" to the first 
  # name

  if (@uncategorized) {
    # must be suffixes like "III", "Jr.", etc
    @suffixes = @uncategorized;
  }
  if (not is_acceptable_suffix(@suffixes)) {
    warn "problem with suffixes " . join " ", @suffixes;
  }
}

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

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