Scan command irule with URI encoding

Herein lies the beauty of list commands over scan. Once you've created a list, that list has properties like a length value:

log local0. [llength $namelist]    
if { [llength $namelist] == 3 } {    
    middle name present
}           

The llength command returns the number of values in the list (3 if there's a middle name). The lindex command returns the item in a list position. List indexes start at zero, so the third item is the second list item.