将“约翰·乔·史密斯先生”分成“先生”“约翰”“乔”“史密斯”

Question

A file supplied by a Client has the following structure:

FullName
Mr John Joe Smith

They would like this transformed to the following:

Salutation	FirstName	MiddleName	LastName
Mr	John	Joe	Smith

I've looked into this and I've tried the following:

SELECT        substring(FullName,0,charindex(' ',Fullname)) As Salutation, substring(FullName,charindex(' ',Fullname)+1,len(fullname)) As FirstName
FROM            dbo.Individuals

This produces:

Salutation	FirstName
Mr	John Joe Smith

I'm struggling to separate it further, is this the best way of doing it or is there a better way?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

As long as there's always the same four elements in the same order...

select  parsename(replace('Mr John Joe Smith',' ','.'),4) [Salutation],
        parsename(replace('Mr John Joe Smith',' ','.'),3) [FirstName],
        parsename(replace('Mr John Joe Smith',' ','.'),2) [MiddleName],
        parsename(replace('Mr John Joe Smith',' ','.'),1) [LastName]

Answer 2

Here's an alternative to parsename:

SELECT *
FROM (
  SELECT FullName,Name
   ,CASE RN WHEN 1 THEN 'Salutation' WHEN 2 THEN 'FirstName' WHEN 3 THEN 'MiddleName' WHEN 4 THEN 'LastName' END AS ColName
  FROM (SELECT FullName,value AS Name,ROW_NUMBER() OVER(PARTITION BY FullName ORDER BY (SELECT NULL)) AS RN
    FROM dbo.Individuals
    CROSS APPLY STRING_SPLIT(FullName,' ') ) base ) mid
PIVOT (MAX(Name) FOR ColName IN ([Salutation],[FirstName],[MiddleName],[LastName]) ) p

You could expand the CASE statement to make it less format-sensitive. For example:

CASE
 WHEN FullName LIKE '% % % %' THEN
  CASE RN WHEN 1 THEN 'Salutation' WHEN 2 THEN 'FirstName' WHEN 3 THEN 'MiddleName' WHEN 4 THEN 'LastName' END
 WHEN FullName LIKE '% % %' THEN
  CASE RN WHEN 1 THEN 'FirstName' WHEN 2 THEN 'MiddleName' WHEN 3 THEN 'LastName' END
 WHEN FullName LIKE '% %' THEN
  CASE RN WHEN 1 THEN 'FirstName' WHEN 2 THEN 'LastName' END
END AS ColName

But this would still backfire and need additional logic if you have a mix of "Mr John Smith"s and "John Joe Smith"s, lines with more than 5 components, etc.

STRING_SPLIT also doesn't have a guaranteed return order according to the documentation, though I've never personally seen it differ from the original string's order. You coulddefine your own function if you need guaranteed ordering, or if you're on pre-compatibility-130 and don't have STRING_SPLIT.