Question

I have a regex that, given the full name, is supposed to capture the first and last name. It should exclude the suffix, like “Jr.”:

(.+)\s(.+(?!\sJr\.))

But this regex applied against the string Larry Farry Barry Jones Jr. gives the match:

  1.    Larry Farry Barry Jones
  2.    Jr.

Why is my negative lookahead failing to ignore the “Jr.” when parsing the full name? I want match #2 to contain “Jones”.

Answer 1

Rather than trying to do it with a single regex, I think the following would be a more maintainable code.

full_name = "Larry Farry Barry Jones Jr."
name_parts = full_name.split - ["Jr."]
first_name, last_name = name_parts[0], name_parts[-1]