• The names never come in like MaggieSmith
• There are no compound first names like "Bubba-Joe Smith"

my @name_part = grep {defined && /[a-zA-Z]/} split /[^a-zA-Z]/, $name;
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This of course is probably unrealistic. In that case, you will need to do some actual parsing not just regex matching. If the above suggestion doesn't work, come back with specifics and we will see if we can't be more helpful.

Assuming the OP just needs a name for lookup (rather than separate firstname and lastname), I would go the opposite direction:

my $normalized_name = lc $name;
$normalized_name =~ tr/a-z//cd;     # or =~ s/[^a-z]//g
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All of the examples from the initial post would then become identical maggiesmiths. This would also work for the input MaggieSmith and Bubba-Joe Smith (producing bubbajoesmith) and for names which differ in cApiTaLiZatiOn.

But, like you said, the specifics are a little sparse, so this solution may also be unsuitable.

As long as the "spacer" characters are not alphabetic the task is, surely, simple:

    $input_str =~ s/\W+/ /g;
    $db_str =~ s/\W+/ /g;
    if(lc($input_str) eq lc($db_str))
        ...
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Of course in the real case you will also want to remove spaces at the start and end of the string etc.

In the production case this is a much more difficult problem since you will also want to find:

    MaggieSmith
    Magie Smythe
    M Smith
    Marge Smith
    Maggie J Smith
    etc
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In a real case good name matching is not trivial and almost always needs fuzzy matching with some combination of Soundex, known alaises and clever processing. There is stuff about this in other nodes.

Thanks a lot for all your help..