"..The initial is always 1 letter with our without a period..."

Will it always be uppercase? (lets assume yes)

So how about this (untested)... 

# Non-greedy capture of everything from the start of the string, until
+ we see
# A whitespace character
# followed by a single upper-case letter
# followed by an (optional) period
# followed by the end of the string
/^(.*?)\s[A-Z]\.?$/;

[download]

Cheers,
Darren :)

In reply to Re: Parsing out first names by McDarren
in thread Parsing out first names by Anonymous Monk

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