Case Caption and the RegEx function

[Biernt]

Hello,

I've tried looking around the forum for a solution to this problem, but I couldn't find anyone dealing with legal case captions.

I'm dealing with a data set consisting of [plaintiff] v. [defendant]. The problem that I'm faced with is the length of the plaintiff's name varies, for example:

John Doe Jr. v. Defendant

John v. Defendant

John Doe v. Defendant

I've used (^[[:alpha:]]*\s[[:alpha:]]*\s[[:alpha:]]*) to parse the plaintiff's name, however, this runs into issues of including the "v" for plaintiff with 2 words as their name, and part of the defendant for plaintiffs who only have 1 word names listed. 

[TerryT · Accepted solution]

Hope it helps:  (.*?)\s+v\.\s+(.*)

[Biernt]

Thank you, Terry! This solved the issue