How to change the structure of a name field in mysql

Question

I have the following problem.

My table, say tab1, has name column as follows "LastName, FirstName". I want to make it so that the column becomes "FirstName LastName".

Any ideas on how this is to be done? Note that there is no comma present, but i guess that can be easily removed once I figure out how to actually flip the first and the last names.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

• It would be better to split the name column into two fields, FirstName and LastName , so that you can format them in any way you want, and still sort on last name.
• Use substring and substring_index to find comma's and split on them. See the manual .

Answer 2

replace @NAME with your real value:

SELECT TRIM(SUBSTR(@NAME, LOCATE(",", @NAME) + 1)) AS prename, TRIM(SUBSTR(@NAME, 1, LOCATE(",", @NAME) - 1)) AS surename

This will extract the prename and surename part, now you can insert/modify the data as you want to.

Answer 3

Not an answer to your question, but I would not do this under any circumstances. You will lose any chance to reliably tell apart last name and first name. Consider the following names:

Bridget St John
Boutros Boutros Ghali
Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg

I recommend keeping separate "last name" and "first name" columns. You can concatenate them as you please when you do your output.

Answer 4

UPDATE table SET name2=CONCAT (TRIM(SUBSTR(name, LOCATE(",", name) + 1)), ' ', TRIM(SUBSTR(name, 1, LOCATE(",", name) - 1)))