I guess that would depend on what you consider a "last name" or a "middle
name"
A typical "western" name has 3 parts, like your example. However there are
many names like "van der Plaats" or "de la Hoya" that are not so easy to
detect based simply on what space to split the name at.
What about
Assuming there are no parts of a name that include more than one word
(e.g., "Mary Jo" being someone's first name), an easy way would be to
use SUBSTRING_INDEX.
First Name = SUBSTRING_INDEX( namefield, ' ', 1 );
Middle Name = SUBSTRING_INDEX( SUBSTRING_INDEX( namefield, ' ', 2 ), ' ', -1 );
Last N
How can I extract a middle segment of text in mySQL. For example a column contains
this string: 'William Walker Jones'. I need to split this into the first, middle, and
last names. I can easily extract the first and last names but how do I extract the
Middle name?
