I have the unpleasent task of moving data from an old flat access table into normalised tables. I need to get two parts out of a string into one field each.

old value m.namestr = "John Doe"
into first_name and last_name
spc = ' '
place = AT(m.namestr, spc,1)
place always = 0, which makes it hard to submit as an argument to SUBSTR()

Thanks in advance for your help.