I have a question when doing the selection from a database:
A column from one of my tables contains the name from persons. Let's say it looks like this:
1. John Smith
2. William Thorne
3. Mark Johanson
Ok, I have shown you some examples of some random names.
The thing is that both, the first name, and the last name are in the same column, and the result I want to come to, when I'm doing the selection in my php file is this:
1. John S.
2. William T.
3. Mark J.
I want that from the last name of each person, to be shown only the initial of the last name. Is there a possibility to do this? If there is, any help would be great.
My code selection example is here:
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM feedback_rate
WHERE accept=1
ORDER BY date DESC
LIMIT $start,$rows_per_page",$con);
Thank you for the help in advance.
You have to realise that this is extremely difficult to do right. Computers don't know about names, they have no idea what's a first name and what's a last name. You therefore will have to make assumptions which aren't always true. I make the assumption that there's always only one first name. Then it is easy to solve in PHP with the following steps:
This is how that is done:
$parts = explode(' ',$fullName);
$firstName = array_pop($parts);
$initial = substr($firstName,0,1);
array_push($parts,$initial.'.');
$fullName = implode(' ',$parts);
And now $fullName will contain what you wanted. The code look a bit long but that's because I try to show it step by step.
It's better to manipulate data in PHP (leaving original data untouched, it's always good practice):
$name = "John Sephre";
$expl = explode(' ', $name);
echo $expl [0].' '.$expl[1][0];
Output:
John S
If you gonna have long names:
$name = "John Sephre More";
$expl = explode(' ', $name);
$last = end($expl);
echo $expl[0].' '.$last[0];
Output:
John M
Also I would recommend to create function for this purpose:
function makeShortName($fullName)
{
$expl = explode(' ', $fullName);
$shortened = $expl[0];
if(count($expl) > 1)
{
$last = end($expl);
$shortened .= ' '.$last[0].'.';
}
return $shortened;
}
So if you pass just John it will return John and if you pass John nickname Surname result will be John S.