Return first and last words in a person name - postgres - postgresql

Question

I have a list of names and I want to separate the first and last words in a person's name.
I was trying to use the "trim" function without success.
Can someone explain how could I do it?
table:
Names
Mary Johnson Angel Smith
Dinah Robertson Donald
Paul Blank Power Silver
Then I want to have as a result:
Names
Mary Smith
Dinah Donald
Paul Silver
Thanks,

Answer 1

You can do it simply with regular expressions, like:
substring(trim(name) FROM '^([^ ]+)') || ' ' || substring(trim(name) FROM '([^ ]+)$')
Of course it would only work you are 100% there is always supplied at least a first and a last name. I'm not 100% sure it is the case for everybody in the World. For instance: would that work for names in Chinese? I'm not sure and I avoid doing any assumption about people names. The best is to simply ask the user two fields, one for the "name" and another for "How would you like to be called?".

Answer 2

Another approach, which takes advantage of Postgres string processing built-in functions:
SELECT split_part(name, ' ', 1) as first_token,
split_part(name, ' ', array_length(regexp_split_to_array(name, ' '), 1)) as last_token
FROM mytable

Answer 3

Here's how I extracted full names from emails with a dot in them, eg Jeremy.Thompson#abc.com
SELECT split_part(email, '.', 1) || ' ' || replace(split_part(email, '.', 2), '#abc','')
FROM people
Result:
Jeremy | Thompson
You can easily replace the dot with a space:
SELECT split_part(email, ' ', 1) || ' ' || replace(split_part(email, ' ', 2), '#abc','')
FROM people