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Getting someones initials from a string of their name in PHP

Hi

I have a string of a name eg "Benjamin James Smith".

I need to get the initials of that name into another string eg "BJS".

At present I am having to split the string by spaces and substr each element of the array. I'm sure their must be a simple way with ereg_replace but I dont have a good enough understanding of the characters you put into that function to make it do what you want!

Can someone tell me how to perform the above function and also point me in the right direction for documentation of how that function works.

Thanks
Rich

Roonaan

Try the next line:

echo ereg_replace('[^A-Z]','', ucwords(strtolower($name)));

There will be an preg variant offcourse, but this is the ereg version.

Regards

-r-

nesnemis

Hi rfila,
try this:

$nameArray = split(" ", $usersFullName);
$initials = "";
for($i=0; $i<$nameArray.length(); $i++)
$initials .= nameArray[$i][0];
echo $initials;

nesnemis

Roonaan

Re: nesnemis:

>At present I am having to split the string by spaces and substr each element of the array.

Therefor your solution isn't quite a solution in this case.

Furthermore $nameArray.length() is nonexisting in php - to my knowledge at least.

Evenso, if you would use the php equivalent of length() (eq: count($nameArray)) you're code would still be inefficient and should be something like:

<?php
$nameArray = split(" ", $usersFullName);
foreach($nameArray as $name)
echo substr(trim($name),0,1);
?>

Regards

-r-

mattjp88

<?
$name="Experts Exchange";
$nameArray=explode(" ",$name);
$initials="";
for ($i=0;$i<sizeof($nameArray);$i++) {
$nameTemp=substring($nameArray[$i],0,1);
$initials.=$nameTemp;
}

$initials=strtoupper($initials);

echo "Initials: $initials";
?>

mattjp88

forgot something. change:

$nameTemp=substring($nameArray[$i],0,1);

to:

$nameTemp=substr(trim($nameArray[$i]),0,1);

suresh_asp

try this regular expression,

preg_match_all("/\b\S/","Benjamin James Smith",$out);
foreach($out as $value){
echo implode("",$value);
}

Roonaan

pfff. the better use $text = ereg_replace("[A-Z]",'',$text);

But that solution will not prevent issues with usernames which aren't entered with capitals.

Therefor you should use ucwords(strtolower($text)) to get all and only the first letters of each word in uppercase.

Also mattjp88's is nice, but is what rfila already has, and asked us to improve...

-r-

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