Unfortunately, that solution has a problem similar to that in the OPed code:

>perl -wMstrict -le
"for my $data (qw(
   Smith%John%BC142%Alberta  Johnson%Andrew%AX321%Engineer
   )) {
   if($data =~ /.*%.*%A/) {
     my @arr = split('%', $data);
     print qq{$arr[0] $arr[1]};
     }
   }
"
Smith John
Johnson Andrew
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