Extract last name, first name and suffix into separate columns - sql

Question

I was wondering if someone could provide me an easy way to extract the names into different columns as below. There is a comma after the Last Name and space between First Name, Middle Initial, and Suffix. Greatly appreciate it.
Stored Data:
Name
Walker,James M JR
Smith,Jack P
Smith,Whitney
Required result:
LastName FirstName Suffix
Walker James JR
Smith Jack
Smith Whitney
Tried Code:
select top 5 Name,
LEFT(Name, CHARINDEX(',', Name) - 1) AS LastName,
right(Name, len(Name) - CHARINDEX(',', Name)) as FirstName
Just having problem with separating First Name from Middle Initial and Suffix. Then getting Suffix from the last space from the right.

Answer 1

You really should store these parts of the name in separate columns (first normal form) to avoid such parsing.
You can put all the logic into one huge call of nested functions, but it is quite handy to separate them into single calls using CROSS APPLY.
The parsing is straight-forward:
find position of comma
split the string into part before comma (LastName) and part AfterComma
find position of first space in the second part AfterComma
split the string into two parts again - this gives FirstName and the rest (AfterSpace)
find position of space in AfterSpace
split the string into two parts again - this gives Initial and Suffix.
The query also checks results of CHARINDEX - it returns 0 if the string is not found.
Obviously, if the string value is not in the expected format, you'll get incorrect result.
DECLARE #T TABLE (Name varchar(8000));
INSERT INTO #T (Name) VALUES
('Walker'),
('Walker,James M JR'),
('Smith,Jack P'),
('Smith,Whitney');
SELECT
Name
,LastName
,AfterComma
,FirstName
,AfterSpace
,MidInitial
,Suffix
FROM
#T
CROSS APPLY (SELECT CHARINDEX(',', Name) AS CommaPosition) AS CA_CP
CROSS APPLY (SELECT CASE WHEN CommaPosition > 0 THEN
LEFT(Name, CommaPosition - 1) ELSE Name END AS LastName) AS CA_LN
CROSS APPLY (SELECT CASE WHEN CommaPosition > 0 THEN
SUBSTRING(Name, CommaPosition + 1, 8000) ELSE '' END AS AfterComma) AS CA_AC
CROSS APPLY (SELECT CHARINDEX(' ', AfterComma) AS SpacePosition) AS CA_SP
CROSS APPLY (SELECT CASE WHEN SpacePosition > 0 THEN
LEFT(AfterComma, SpacePosition - 1) ELSE AfterComma END AS FirstName) AS CA_FN
CROSS APPLY (SELECT CASE WHEN SpacePosition > 0 THEN
SUBSTRING(AfterComma, SpacePosition + 1, 8000) ELSE '' END AS AfterSpace) AS CA_AS
CROSS APPLY (SELECT CHARINDEX(' ', AfterSpace) AS Space2Position) AS CA_S2P
CROSS APPLY (SELECT CASE WHEN Space2Position > 0 THEN
LEFT(AfterSpace, Space2Position - 1) ELSE AfterSpace END AS MidInitial) AS CA_MI
CROSS APPLY (SELECT CASE WHEN Space2Position > 0 THEN
SUBSTRING(AfterSpace, Space2Position + 1, 8000) ELSE '' END AS Suffix) AS CA_S
result
Name LastName AfterComma FirstName AfterSpace MidInitial Suffix
Walker Walker
Walker,James M JR Walker James M JR James M JR M JR
Smith,Jack P Smith Jack P Jack P P
Smith,Whitney Smith Whitney Whitney