use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $name = 'JohnDoe, JaneAnneDoe';

$name =~ s/(?<=[a-z])(?=[A-Z])/ /g;
print $name;
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Prints:

John Doe, Jane Anne Doe
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How does your format show "Tina McBride" (anyone for some country music?) or "Tim O'Reilly" (mmmm... books...)? If they are "TinaMcBride" and "TimO'Reilly", then your algorithm will end up with "Tina Mc Bride" and "Tim O' Reilly". This is a HARD problem. Because some people are really, really picky about their names, and getting it wrong is just not a (legal) option.

I had a coworker who legally appended his nickname to his name to make a new surname. That's because he lived in Toronto, but had a very Polish name - one with sounds that us poor English-speakers couldn't distinguish. He went by this nickname at all times, and wanted things like his email (centrally controlled via Lotus Notes) to show up as just his nickname - not his full name as is the default. It took him 6 months to get that changed. Because it was his legal surname, he had that legal right to be referred to by that name.

It is that serious to some people.

Or this...

$string =~ s/(?<=\w)([A-Z])/ $1/g;
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Now any capital letter character preceedd by a 'word' character will have a space prepended.

s/\B(?=\p{Upper})/ /g;
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Don’t use [A-Z], that’s a red flag. It only works for English, at most.

Makeshifts last the longest.

Don’t use [A-Z], that’s a red flag. It only works for English, at most.

There is a lot of software that only works for Englsh; I'm not sure I'd call it a "red flag". Maybe more flexibility should be used in this case, and maybe it doesn't matter. Don't get me wrong... it's good advice. I just don't see a "red flag" when I see [A-Z] unless I know that the program needs to deal with character sets other than ASCII. That has been rare in my world (though decreasingly so.)

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

Considering you don’t speak English, German and Greek, that doesn’t suprise me… :-)

For me, it is the other way around: I use [A-Z] explicitly when I really mean to deal with ASCII only.

Makeshifts last the longest.

One solution:

my $string = "JohnDoe";
$string =~ s/(.)([A-Z])/$1 $2/g;
print $string;
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Note that that puts a space in front of John.

---

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

Depends on whether the string consists only of the name (or more precisely, starts with the name) or not. If it does then there's no extra space.

You could fix your original code less invasively with

s/(?<!^)([A-Z])/ $1/g;
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But [A-Z] only works for English, at most, and should be avoided.

s/(?<!^)(\p{Upper})/ $1/g;
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Makeshifts last the longest.