I like regexes :) and, well, they are not that difficult to understand

use strict;
use warnings;

while (<DATA>) {
  my $shortname = join '. ', /\|([A-Z])\S*\s+([^|]+)/;
  print $shortname," or ";
# or if the rest of the line is to be left alone
  s/(\|[A-Z])\S*\s+([^|]+)/$1. $2/;
  print;
}
__DATA__
24|Janeth Arcain|6|6|217|36.2|51|106|.481|
321|Elen Chakirova|5|0|27|5.4|2|4|.500|
380|Kelley Gibson-White|6|0|85|14.2|3|17|.176|8|8|1.000|

[download]

Of course this puts still some constraints on the names, e.g. two first names like in 'Johann Sebastian Bach' are not allowed ... and probably a lot more special cases

-- Hofmator

In reply to Re: Parsing Names in a Text File by Hofmator
in thread Parsing Names in a Text File by Perl Newby

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