Split Full Name — Solution & ExplanationProblems / Split Full Name / EditorialApproach

Extract the first word with regexp_extract(full_name, '^(\\S+)', 1) — ^\\S+ anchors to the start and matches up to the first space.

Extract the last word with regexp_extract(full_name, '(\\S+)$', 1) — anchored to the end, so any middle names are skipped automatically.

Order by customer_id.

Key InsightSplitting on spaces and indexing (parts[0], parts[-1]) works, but requires knowing the list length in SQL. Anchored regular expressions (^\\S+, \\S+$) express "first word" and "last word" directly and handle two-, three-, and four-word names with the same expression.Hints

The first word is everything before the first space; the last word is everything after the last space.

regexp_extract with '^(\\S+)' grabs the first word and '(\\S+)$' grabs the last word — no need to count how many words there are.

In PySpark, F.regexp_extract(column, pattern, 1) works the same way.

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