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

Depending on how clean your data is, I think you are going to have a tough time finding a single regex that does what you want. What different formats do you expect the names to be in? I've had to write similar code and there can be a lot of variations: - first last - last, first - first middle last - last, first middle

And then you have things like suffixes (Junior, senior, III, etc.) and prefixes ( Mr., Mrs, etc), combined names (e.g. John and Mary Smith). As some others have already mentioned you also have to deal with multi-part last names (e.g. Victor de la Hoya) as well.

I found I had to deal with all of those possibilities before I could reliably pull out the first and last names.