What CF tags do I use ? - still cannot get it to work

To turn to New York Guy's original question, you could put the required functionality in a function, like this:

<cfscript>
function convertToInitials(fullName) {
    // array to store name initials
    var initial = arrayNew(1);
    var convertedName = "";
    var currentName = "";
    var isCurrentNameInitial = false;
    var surname = listlast(fullname," ");
    var numberOfNameElements = listLen(fullName," ");
    // initialize array
    var arrayIsSet = arraySet(initial, 1,numberOfNameElements, "");
    var i = 1;
    if (numberOfNameElements GT 1) {
        for (i=1; i LT numberOfNameElements; i=i+1) {
            // i-th name
            currentName = listGetAt(fullName,i," ");
            // Test whether current name already an initial of the form A., A.B., A.B.C., etc?
            isCurrentNameInitial = REfindNoCase("([a-z]\.)+$",currentName,1,false) GT 0;           
            if (isCurrentNameInitial) {
                initial = currentName;
                convertedName = convertedName & initial;
            }
            else {
                // get uppercased initial letter of i-th name
                initial = ucase(left(currentName,1));
                convertedName = convertedName & initial & ".";
            }
        }
    }
    convertedName = convertedName & " " & surname;
    return convertedName;
}
</cfscript>

<!--- Test the func! --->

The New York Guy: <cfoutput>#convertToInitials("The New York Guy")#</cfoutput><br>

A.K.A. The New York Guy: <cfoutput>#convertToInitials("A.K.A. The New York Guy")#</cfoutput>

You would probably have some luck using the list functions and treating your name as a space delimited list.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/coldfusion/8/htmldocs/functions-pt0_13.html

<cfouput>#listLen("Joe C Smith"," ")#</cfoutput>

But I do wonder how you plan to account for my favorite name "Mary Joe Sue Von der LongName".  An unusual name from a mix of cultures, but it does demonstrate that all names are not three single words for first, middle and last.

You could use list functions to remove the last element of a space-delimited list to be the surname, and then treat the remainder as a list of forenames loop over them, truncating them.

You could probably use a regex replace to do it also, but I haven't had coffee yet so am not going to tackle that one.

One note though.  What about names that don't follow the pattern "forename[ forename[...]] surname", like a lot of non-european names do?  Some name patterns have the family name first, and the given names second.

To be honest, I would not monkey with people's names, I'd just leave them as the way they chose to type them in.

--

Adam