Just look at the data you have here: 

John Hand Brown Cindy Jones Thomas More

[download]

Knowing nothing else about your data, I look at this and decide that there are three seperate names here, which are "John Hand Brown", "Cindy Jones", and "Thomas More". But it's quite possible that the names are actually "John Hand", "Brown Cindy", and "Jones Thomas More", or perhaps some other combination. Consider that the human brain is much, much better at solving ambiguity than computers are (or at least making a solution that is closer to reality).

If the data above is repesentative of what you have, then I don't think you're going to find a solution with even an acceptable failure rate.

----
send money to your kernel via the boot loader.. This and more wisdom available from Markov Hardburn.

In reply to Re: Changing from full name to last, first mid by hardburn
in thread Changing from full name to last, first mid by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.