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Best way to extract Initials from a Full name?

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    Best way to extract Initials from a Full name?

    I have a full name held as a string e.g.:

    "Alastair Whyley"

    and would like to extract just the initials from this, I have come up with the following (which seems rather long winded and messy) does anyone know of a better way of doing this?

    Left("Alastair Whyley",1) + Right(Left("Alastair Whyley", pos_from_word_number(initials, 2," ")), 1)

    Is there a neater way of doing this, or is this how others would do it?

    #2
    Re: Best way to extract Initials from a Full name?

    Names are tricky.

    In your data ...

    are there always two "words"?
    any hyphenated words?
    suffixes?

    gets complex.

    Better to collect the data in pieces on the front end:
    fname
    mname
    lname
    suffix

    but then you probably already know that, right?

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Best way to extract Initials from a Full name?

      Hi Tom,

      Thanks for your reply, yes I agree this is a tricky area, however I am trying to keep it simple by only storing a first and surname all as one string as this is how I started this db so many years ago now. Changing to a better method may cause lots of problems in other forms/reports etc.. I don't however have hyphens or any other punctuation involved so this makes it a bit simpler.

      As I said in my first post, the code I show above works but it seems a bit messy. I was just wondering if there was an in-built function to do this? Alpha Five allows capitalisation of the first letter of each word, so it must have the facility to identify the first letter of each word (in a string) built in somewhere already don't you think?

      I suppose another way would be to have an initials field in the salespeoples table...

      By the way - I just spotted a mistake in the code I showed above - it should read as follows:

      Left("Alastair Whyley",1) + Right(Left("Alastair Whyley", pos_from_word_number("Alastair Whyley", 2," ")), 1)

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Best way to extract Initials from a Full name?

        I think the word() function is commonly used to extract "words" from a string. It should simplify things greatly.

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