Extracting initials from name in vf page

Question

I am working on a requirement wherein I need to extract first letter of the user names and show on the page.However the last names can contain spaces. In such cases I need to display initials of all the last names eg Frank Robert Clark should become FRC (Robert Clark being the last name).

I know this can easily be achieved through apex. I would however be interested to know if i can achieve it without making any apex changes(as in my case it would involve creating a wrapper/map which i want to avoid) by making use of VF functions or formula field.

Right now the approach is to extract first character of first name and last name fields using the LEFT formula: {!LEFT(usr.FirstName,1)} {!LEFT(usr.LastName,1)}

Answer 1

This is ugly... But it works. :)

LEFT(  FirstName , 1) + LEFT ( LastName, 1) +
IF(CONTAINS(LastName, ' '), MID( LastName, FIND(' ', LastName) + 1, 1), '')

You will have to add a similar if statement to account for hyphens as well.. and perhaps single apostrophes too.