Online Lower Case Converter

How can I separate firstname and surname from a string like this:

Pietro DE GIOVANNI

(Pietro being the firstname and DE GIOVANNI the surname)

I used to do it with an explode() on the spaces, but obviously it doesn't work on a person like that.

Thanks in advance.

My program is supposed to take an input in form of a string and split into to strings, one with all the lower case letters, underscores and dots. The other one with all the upper cases, the pipes and the spaces. I am not supposed to use (for function)

def split_rec (letters):    uppers = ""    lowers = ""    if letters[0].isupper() or letters[0] == "|" or letters[0].isspace():        uppers += letters[0] + split_rec (letters[1:])    elif letters[0].islower() or letters[0] == "_" or letters[0] == ".":        lowers += letters[0] + split_rec (letters[1:])    elif not letters:        return lowers, uppers

Can you please tell me more about the error I'm getting?

if letters[0].isupper() or letters[0] == "|" or letters[0].isspace(): IndexError: string index out of range

I'm converting a bunch of (Progress) programs for use on linux (previously used on Windows) and I'm looking for a way to grep for program names with both uppercase and lowercase letters, such as "skip_xref.I" or "NO_dt2.i". How can I achieve this?

How could I downcase a non-English string in Ruby on Rails 3 ?

str = "Привет"    # Russian puts str[0].ord   # => 1055str.downcase!puts str[0].ord   # => 1055 (Should be 1087)

I want it to work in Ruby 1.8.7 as well as Ruby 1.9.2.

How do I take a string and convert it to lower or upper case in Ruby?