The question of splitting a full name into first, middle, and last came up today in the forums. This is a pretty common question with many possible solutions. I came up one solution which is a CFMX UDF that utilizes regular expressions to match the different possible combinations of individual names.

The following function, splitFullName, will accept a parameter fullName and return a structure containing keys firstName, mi, and lastName. Even if no matches are found, it will always return a structure with these three keys, but they might be blank.

I’ve tested the function with a few hundred names in the following forms:

• First Last
• First MI Last
• Last, First
• Last, First MI

The code also includes a function safeMid which is basically a wrapper for mid() but allows passing zero for the position or length without generating an error.