In article <4817502b$1@news.victoria.tc.ca>, yf110@vtn1.victoria.tc.ca (Malcolm Dew-Jones) wrote:
>Doug Miller (spambait@milmac.com) wrote:
>: I need to be able to pull just the last name out of a string consisting of
>: lastname and firstname, separated by a comma, or space, or comma and space.
>: Complicating matters somewhat is the fact that lastname might be something
>: like "Mc Kay" or "St. Louis" so simply grabbing everything before the first
>: space isn't sufficient.
>
>: The closest I've come so far is
>: select regexp_substr ('St. Louis, Ted', '.{4}[A-Z]+') from dual;
>: but this returns only
>: St. L
>
>[A-Z] doesn't match o

Yeah, I just got back from lunch and realized the same thing. Knew it had to
be something stupid like that. Thanks.