Split string First and Lastname (Capitals and Lowercase) - php

Question

<?php
$string1 = "FARMER John";
$string2 = "OVERMARS DE Rafa";
$string3 = "VAN DER BELT Dick";
?>
To save the first and lastname in a mysql database I need to split the string.
Above you can see a few examples.
What is the best way to split this string, note that the lastname is in caps.
Result should be:
ResultString1: John FARMER
ResultString2: Rafa OVERMARS DE
ResultString3: Dick VAN DER BELT

Answer 1

This is a really bad idea.
There are tons of things that can go wrong if you're purely relying on letter case to signify something. And saving it all in another string just perpetuates the problem.
That said, you can mitigate (a small amount of) the badness by storing the new values separately, so as not to pass along unstructured information to the next unfortunate person who has to maintain your database. This code does that, while also allowing for multi-word first names (like "John Paul" or such).
I also made it handle these in array form, since I assume that you probably want to handle more than three names.
<?php
$string1 = "FARMER John";
$string2 = "OVERMARS DE Rafa Dafa";
$string3 = "VAN DER BELT Dick";
$strings = array(array('orig'=>$string1), array('orig'=>$string2), array('orig'=>$string3));
foreach($strings as $key=>$val){
$oldwords = explode(' ',$val['orig']);
foreach($oldwords as $word){
if(preg_match('/[a-z]/',$word)){
$firstname .= " ".$word;
}else{
$lastname .= " ".$word;
}
}
$firstname = trim($firstname);
$lastname = trim($lastname);
$strings[$key]['newfirst'] = $firstname;
$strings[$key]['newlast'] = $lastname;
$firstname = "";
$lastname = "";
}
print_r($strings);
?>

Answer 2

Follow the following steps:
Convert string to array when space appears.
Pop out the last array element(apparently the first name) using array_pop.
Insert the popped out name in front using array_unshift
Convert array back to string.
$string3 = "VAN DER BELT Dick";
$arr = explode(" ", $string3);
array_unshift($arr, array_pop($arr));
echo implode(" ", $arr); // Dick VAN DER BELT

Answer 3

$arr = explode(" ", $string3);
$last_word = array_pop($arr);
$final_string = ucfirst($last_word)." ".strtoupper(implode(" ", $arr));
echo $final_string;

Answer 4

As others said, your problem description is rather vague. However with a fixed pattern like this, you could very well split the names via a regular expression (given the surname is always in uppercase):
<?php
$strings = array("FARMER John", "OVERMARS DE Rafa", "VAN DER BELT Dick");
$regex = '~^([A-Z ]+\b)(\w+)$~';
foreach ($strings as $string) {
if(preg_match($regex, $string, $match)) {
$surname = trim($match[1]);
$forename = trim($match[2]);
echo "Surname: $surname, Forename: $forename\n";
}
}
?>
See a working demo on ideone.com (plus the one on regex101.com).