Regex - Return First and Last Name

Question

I\'m looking for the best reliable way to return the first and last name of a person given the full name, so far the best I could think of is the following

Answer 1

Instead of a regex you might find it easier to do something like:

$parts = explode(" ", $name);
$first = $parts[0];
$last = ""
if (count($parts) > 1) {
    $last = $parts[count($parts) - 1];
}

You might want to replace multiple consecutive bits of whitespace with a single space first, so you don't get empty bits, and get rid of trailing/leading whitespace:

$name = ereg_replace("[ \t\r\n]+", " ", trim($name));