Separate "Name" into "FirstName" and "LastName" columns of data frame

Question

I am struggling to figure out how to take a single column of "Name" in a dataframe split it into two other columns of FistName and LastName within the same data frame. The challenge is that some of my Names have several last names. Essentially, I want to take the first word (or element of the string) and put it in the FirstName columns, then put all following text (minus the space of course) into the LastName column.

This is my DataFrame "tteam"

NAME <- c('John Doe','Peter Gynn','Jolie Hope-Douglas', 'Muhammad Arnab Halwai')
TITLE <- c("assistant", "manager", "assistant", "specialist")
tteam<- data.frame(NAME, TITLE)

My desired output would like this:

FirstName <- c("John", "Peter", "Jolie", "Muhammad")
LastName <- c("Doe", "Gynn", "Hope-Douglas", "Arnab Halwai")
tteamdesire <- data.frame(FirstName, LastName, TITLE)

I have tried the following code to create a new data frame of just names that allow me to extract the first names from the first column. However, I am unable to put the last names into any order.

names <- tteam$NAME ##  puts full names into names vector
namesdf <- data.frame(do.call('rbind', strsplit(as.character(names),' ',fixed=TRUE))) 
## splits out all names into a dataframe PROBLEM IS HERE!

Answer 1

You could use extract from tidyr

 library(tidyr)
 extract(tteam, NAME, c("FirstName", "LastName"), "([^ ]+) (.*)")
 #  FirstName     LastName      TITLE
 #1      John          Doe  assistant
 #2     Peter         Gynn    manager
 #3     Jolie Hope-Douglas  assistant
 #4  Muhammad Arnab Halwai specialist

Answer 2

Try:

> firstname = sapply(strsplit(NAME, ' '), function(x) x[1])
> firstname 
[1] "John"     "Peter"    "Jolie"    "Muhammad"

> lastname = sapply(strsplit(NAME, ' '), function(x) x[length(x)])
> lastname
[1] "Doe"          "Gynn"         "Hope-Douglas" "Halwai"      

or:

> ll = strsplit(NAME, ' ')
> 
> firstname = sapply(ll, function(x) x[1])
> lastname = sapply(ll, function(x) x[length(x)])
> 
> firstname
[1] "John"     "Peter"    "Jolie"    "Muhammad"
> lastname
[1] "Doe"          "Gynn"         "Hope-Douglas" "Halwai"