Remove a Middle Initial and Period from Field: Access 2003

Remove a Middle Initial and Period from Field

I have a Field name Employee_FirstName with thousands of values. I need a Function that removes the Middle initial and Period if it is present. Each Middle initial is followed by a period. Some people just have their first name without a MI and period.

Sample Data
Oscar L. should be Oscar
Tammy H. should be Tammy
Jo Anne should remain Jo Anne

How can I accomplish this with a Function and an expression in a query? Thanks

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You can add the UDF below, and then use it like this:

SELECT Employee_FirstName, RegExpReplace(Employee_FirstName, " [A-Z]\.", "",True, False) AS FirstOnly
FROM SomeTable

Function RegExpReplace(LookIn As String, PatternStr As String, Optional ReplaceWith As String = "", _
    Optional ReplaceAll As Boolean = True, Optional MatchCase As Boolean = True) 
    ' This function uses Regular Expressions to parse a string, and replace parts of the string
    ' matching the specified pattern with another string.  The optional argument ReplaceAll controls
    ' whether all instances of the matched string are replaced (True) or just the first instance (False)
    
    ' By default, RegExp is case-sensitive in pattern-matching.  To keep this, omit MatchCase or
    ' set it to True
    
    ' If you use this function from Excel, you may substitute range references for all the arguments
    
    Static RegX As Object
    
    If RegX Is Nothing Then Set RegX = CreateObject("VBScript.RegExp")
    With RegX
        .Pattern = PatternStr
        .Global = ReplaceAll
        .IgnoreCase = Not MatchCase
    End With
    
    RegExpReplace = RegX.Replace(LookIn, ReplaceWith)
    
    Set RegX = Nothing
    
End Function

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Remove a Middle Initial and Period from Field

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Access 2003

Access Coding/Macros

Microsoft Access Database

SQL Query Syntax

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