Question

I have a column name that represents a person’s name in the following format:

firstname [middlename] lastname [, Sr.|Jr.]

For, example:

John Smith
John J. Smith
John J. Smith, Sr.

How can I order items by lastname?

Answer 1

A correct and faster version could look like this:

SELECT *
FROM   tbl
ORDER  BY substring(name, '([^[:space:]]+)(?:,|$)')

Or:

ORDER  BY substring(name, E'([^\\s]+)(?:,|$)')

Or even:

ORDER  BY substring(name, E'([^\\s]+)(,|$)')

Explain

[^[:space:]]+ .. first (and longest) string consisting of one or more non-whitespace characters.
(,|$) .. terminated by a comma or the end of the string.

The last two examples use escape-string syntax and the class-shorthand \s instead of the long form [[:space:]] (which loses the outer level of brackets when inside a character class).

We don’t actually have to use non-capturing parenthesis (?:) after the part we want to extract, because (quoting the manual):

.. if the pattern contains any parentheses, the portion of the text that
matched the first parenthesized subexpression (the one whose left
parenthesis comes first) is returned.

Test

SELECT substring(name, '([^[:space:]]+)(?:,|$)')
FROM  (VALUES 
  ('John Smith')
 ,('John J. Smith')
 ,('John J. Smith, Sr.')
 ,('foo bar Smith, Jr.')
) x(name)