I am trying to take the first name from a person’s full name with two possibly cases. First case if the person’s name is like: SMITH, A DOE
This one could be done like this, unless there is a better way:

$mystring = ($mystring =~ /(\w{3,})$/) ? $1 : '';
Print “DOE”;
[download]

But if the person’s name is as this: BULLOCK JOE A
It can be done like this, unless there is a better way:

$mystring = ($mystring =~ / (\w{1,2}\s)(\w+)$/) ? $2 : '';
Print “JOE”;
[download]

My goal is to get this line of code to work for both, no luck, any suggestions?

$mystring = ($mystring =~ /(\w{1}\s\w+)|(\w{3,})$/) ? $1 : '';

print "\n $mystring\n";
[download]

Test code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

#my $mystring = "SMITH, A DOE";
my $mystring  = "BULLOCK JOE A";

if($mystring =~ /(\w{3,})$/) {
    
   print "\n\n $1\n\n";
    
}elsif($mystring =~ /(\w{1,2}\s)(\w+)$/) {
    
  print "\n\n $2\n\n";
  
}
[download]

Thanks for looking!