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How to Name Parsing (First, Middle and Last names) in Alteryx?

This post was originally published on The Data School blog between 2018 and July 2025, before our program was renamed to MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. References throughout this article to “The Data School” or “DS” all refer to what is now MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. The program, its people, and its commitment to launching outstanding analytics careers remain the same – just under a new name.

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Consider the following scenario,

If we need to split these Customer Names into three columns with First Name, Middle Name and Last Name Columns, how do we achieve it in Alteryx?

There are millions of ways to do it; the most efficient way is through Regex.

 

Here is the Regex I discovered that could solve this problem

 

(^[[:alpha:]]+)s*([[:alpha:]]*)s+([[:alpha:]]+$)

 

 

 

And the result:

 

Everything is good apart from one case, if you have a first name or a last name that contains a space, such as “Lou Lan” or “Joe Jo”, this Regex could still give you some trouble. But in most cases, this Regex will work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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