regexp_substr help, please

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

I thought regular expression matching was supposed to be "greedy", and take as many characters as would satisfy the pattern ("St. Louis" in this case).

What am I doing wrong? Received on Tue Apr 29 2008 - 10:34:24 CDT