Just realized that one approach is to have Pandoc pass the full name string
(e.g. 'First Last') to the template, but then to create a macro inside the
template that will return just the first word in the string, as described
here
<https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/316730/extract-first-word-in-a-string>.
That worked for me!

On Fri, Feb 3, 2023 at 11:55 AM Paul Kelleher <paul-JZTKsBFbLNkkm2bSNb+QWw@public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Is it possible to use a pipe in a template to generate just the first word
> of a variable?
>
> My specific use case is to produce just the first name of a first-and-last
> name that I place in the "to" field of a YAML block that passes info to a
> letter template. I'd like to generate "Dear <first name>,". To do this now,
> I've defined "to" as an array, with the first name as the first value of
> the array and the last name as the second value; then I can use the
> predefined 'first' pipe to return just the first name. But for reasons
> specific to my particular use case, it'd be great to have a pipe that
> returns the first word of a multi-word variable.
>
> Thanks!
>
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