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))
        ...

[download]

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

[download]

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.

In reply to Re: How to get the required names by hawtin
in thread How to get the required names by Anonymous Monk

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