extracting characters from a string

Dear All,

I have a data frame of vectors of publication names such as 'pub':

pub1 <- c('Brown DK, Santos R, Rome DF, Don Juan X')
pub2 <- c('Benigni D')
pub3 <- c('Arstra SD, Van den Hoops DD, lamarque D')

pub <- rbind(pub1, pub2, pub3)


I would like to construct a dataframe with only author's last name and each last name in columns and the publication in rows. Basically I want to get rid of the initials (max 2, always before a comma) and spaces surounding last name. I would like to avoid a loop.

ps: If I could have even a short explanation of the code that extract the values of the character string that would also be great!


David

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