Postgres normalize human name string
regexp_replace should be enough:
regexp_replace('R.C. Bray.', '([A-Z])(\.)(\w)', '\1\2 \3', 'g') 

This replaces a single upper case letter followed by a . directly followed by a &quot;word character&quot; by inserting a space between the dot and the character. It leaves dots that have a whitespace after them untouched.