Here is a Perlish way to convert a name into AD format: 
sub format_name_for_AD {
    my $empl_name = shift;            # $empl_name has the form "Last,
+ First"

    my ($last, $first) = $empl_name=~/^([^,]+), (.+)/ or return undef;
    
    return uc(substr($first, 0, 1)) . ucfirst($last);
}

for ('Smith, John', 'Wall, Larry', 'Perlis, Alan', 'Ritchie, Dennis') 
+{
    print format_name_for_AD($_), "\n";
}

[download]
I'll leave what's going on as an exercise to the reader (hint: perlre), but as a short comment, I'll say that string matching in Perl shouldn't look like string matching in C. :)

In reply to Re: Perl 'grammar' by gamache
in thread Perl 'grammar' by gortok

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