how to create username from email address provided - PHP

Question

I have a signup page on my website where a user must provide a email address and password only.

I want to be able to create a username for this user automatically by using the first part of the email provided;

User supplies gordon@yourdomain.com, i want to make username 'gordon'

I don't need explanation on how to create form or submission of data to database, just the code to extract data from email provided, and if necessary, if duplicate occurs add number to end.

Hope this makes sense, seems like a basic function but couldn't find examples of it anywhere on net!

Answer 1

This is not a good idea, just use their full email address. The following email addresses could be different people, but they will become the same under your system.

[email protected]
[email protected]

Adding a number to the end will make the user remember something unique to your system and cause much confusion on their end.

Answer 2

Something like:

$username = left($email, stripos($email, '@'));

should do. You may want to learn regular expressions for these kinds of task.

Then you add the counter:

function countOccurrences($name)
{
    $con = mysql_connect(___, ___, ___);
    if (!$con)
    {
        die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
    }

    mysql_select_db(___, $con);

    $result = mysql_query("
        SELECT COUNT(*) AS countOccurrences
        FROM users
        WHERE username LIKE '" . mysql_real_escape_string($name, $con) . "%'
    ");

    $row = mysql_fetch_array($result);

    $number = $row['countOccurrences'];

    mysql_close($con);

    return $number;

}

and then:

$countUsers = countOccurrences($username);
if ($countUsers>0)    
{    
      $username = $username . $countUsers;
}

IMPORTANT: Consider using the whole email as username: you don't want [email protected] to be considered equal to [email protected]

NOTE: example code counts gordon, gordon1, gordon2 but gordonbah, gordonq, gordonxxx too

NOTE: this is pretty rough, and should not be considered best PHP practice; it's just to give the general idea

Answer 3

<?php
 preg_match('/[^@]+)@/',$email,$matches);
 $username = $matches[1];
 check_availability($username);
?>

Answer 4

Agreed, you're stripping a necessarily unique ID into a non-unique ID. Unless you want to add some sort of handling to add a number to the username or something. If that's what you really want to do, this should set $username to the stuff before the email address:

<?php
   $username = preg_replace('/([^@]*).*/', '$1', $email);
?>

Answer 5

Should suit your needs :D

$username = substr($username, 0, strpos($username, '@'));

$username = mysql_real_escape_string($username);

$result = mysql_query('SELECT `username` FROM `users` WHERE `username` = \'' . $username . '%\';');

if (mysql_num_rows($result) > 0) {

   $i = 0;

   while ($name_arr = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {

      $name = $name_arr['username'];       

      $after = substr($name, strlen($username));

      if (ctype_digit($after)) {

         if (($after = (int) $after) > $i) {

            $i = $after;

         }

      }

   }

   if ($i > 0) {
      $username .= $i;
   }

}

Answer 6

Why not I can't sign space?