Extracting First Name from Full Name

When a form asks for "name," some people will type in their first name, others will type in their full name. Even when the form asks for "first name" or "full name," the contrary is frequently provided.

Without additional information available, one can't construct a full name from a variable containing only the first name.

However, it's actually quite simple to extract the first name from a variable containing the full name. Let's assume:

my $FullName = 'William J. Bontrager';

This line will extract the first name:

my $FirstName = (split(/\s+/,$FullName,2))[0];

The above will extract the first name ("William") whether $FullName contains 1, 2, 3, or more names.

It is assumed there will be no leading white space in $FullName's value. With leading white space, the $FirstName's value would be null.

This will remove any leading white space in $FullName's value prior to extracting the First Name:

$FullName =~ s/^\s*//s;
my $FirstName = (split(/\s+/,$FullName,2))[0];

Okay, one more.

The name might be provided by the form user as initial cap, all upper-case, all lower-case, or mixed case. To conform all first names to initial caps, this can be used:

$FirstName = ucfirst(lc($FirstName));

Will Bontrager