Question

I have a name “John B. Smith”, I need to change the format of the name to “Smith, John B.” I was thinking about using a regex, but I don’t fully understand it even after reading about it. Can someone help?

Also can you take a moment to explain what is going on in the expression?

Answer 1

Here is an example I’ve put up at Rubular.

The regex I used is (\w+)\s+(\w+)\s+(\w+). Here is a break down of it:

1. When I use \w+, I am saying that I’m looking for a regex with one or more letters, numbers or underscores. This is commonly used to look for words.
2. When I use \s+, I’m looking for one or more space characters.
3. The () means that I want to capture (aka remember) the portion of the input that this regex matched.