[RESOLVED] regexp for parsing names into f_name, m_name, l_name

[datagroove]

If there's a regexp guru in the house who can give some direction i'd appreciated it.

i need to break down a single variable into 3. The variable contains the full name of a person and i need to break it down into the first name, middle name, and last name. The difficulty comes when you account for the various ways a name may be provided for (especially the middle name and sometimes nickname).
if there is a nickname its always surrounded by a quotes.

The var name is $name, there is only one var $name per script. Examples of all the different types of arrangements that the string $name my have:

John J. Smith
Albert Kemp 'Al' Johnson
Peter 'Pete' Friendly
Jane Fondu
Michael M. 'Mike' Yupa
Chris Ulysses Byod
Jesse George 'The Body' Ventura

the end result of the preg_match should be 3 new vars, f_name, m_name, l_name. End results of each above examples would look like this:

$f_name = 'John'; $m_name = 'J.'; $l_name = 'Smith';
$f_name = 'Albert'; $m_name = 'Kemp \'Al\''; $l_name = 'Johnson';
$f_name = 'Peter'; $m_name = '\'Pete\''; $l_name = 'Fondu';
$f_name = 'Jane'; $m_name = 'NULL'; $l_name = 'Smith';
$f_name = 'Michael'; $m_name = 'M. \'Mike\''; $l_name = 'Yupa';
$f_name = 'Chris'; $m_name = 'Ulysses'; $l_name = 'Byod';
$f_name = 'Jesse'; $m_name = 'George \'The Body\''; $l_name = 'Ventrua'; 

Obviously the difficulty here is the middle name ($m_name), there are many different variants (all listed). Once again, i only need the script to work on one name per load.
thanks guys, this forum is great,
c

[drew010]

this one seemed to work for all names...

preg_match('/^(\w+) (.*? )?(\w+)$/', $name, $matches);

[justsomeone]

Use explode() to explode each name into an array of substrings, using the space as the separation character.

eg

$name = "Matthew 'Mad Matt' Monroe";

$namebits = explode(" ", $name);

$f_name = $namebits[0];  //first element is first name
$l_name = $namebits[sizeof($namebits)-1]; // last element is surname


//to get middlename we need to concat all the elements other than
//first and sur names.
$m_name="";
for ($i=1; $<(sizeof($namebits)-1); $i++){
    $m_name .= $namebits[$i] . " ";
}
$m_name = trim(m_name);

This is untested code, but it should be pretty ok, but could probably do with a little additional tweaking.

[datagroove]

drew010 wrote:

this one seemed to work for all names...

preg_match('/^(\w+) (.*? )?(\w+)$/', $name, $matches);

IT DID! thanks