Automatic generation of usernames using first initial last name

[xsnByron]

Hey,

I'm trying to figure out an easy way to modify a user account creation script I've put together to where the user's first and last name are collected and used to generate a username for them.. (instead of allowing them to supply their own..)

e.g. John Smith would be created as jsmith.
John Smith #2 would then be created as jsmith2.

Any simple ideas on how I can strip the form data down to the first letter? And how I should append numbers to create unique names when necessary?

 

[homefish]

[tt]sub realname_to_logname {
# given a realname, return an available logname
my $name = lc($_[0]);
my @names = split( /\s+/, $name);# into words
my $logname = substr( $names[0], 0, 1) . $names[$#names];
my $try = getpwnam( $logname ); # non-zero if $logname exists
my $i=2; # avoid 1 - it looks like letter el

while ( $try ) {
$logname =~ s/(\d*)$/sprintf("%d",$i++)/e;
$try = getpwnam( $logname );
}
return $logname;
}

while(<>){
print realname_to_logname($_), &quot;\n&quot;;
}[/tt]


Have fun,


fish

 

[xsnByron]

One thing I forgot to mention, as I thought it wouldn't matter.. is that I'm trying to perform this task on a Win32 machine (Windows 2000 specifically) using Perl, and not on a Unix-based OS...

I noticed that getpwnam is an unimplemented function in my version of ActivePerl, and further research has led me to believe that I won't be able to use the function on a windows machine.

Any suggestions/alternatives for this problem that may allow me to make good use of the snippet I've see above?

 

[PaulTEG]

Have a look on CPAN

http://www.cpan.org

HTH
Paul

 

[xsnByron]

I have researched the topic on CPAN a little, but I haven't had much luck with finding code that can manipulate a supplied text string and strip off the first character, while appending an entire second string into one final string.... It's basically sounding like a (chop) command that will actually be able to chop any amount of the name ..(regardless of letters or character length...)

Any suggestions on how to do this? Also, I want to restate that I'm trying this on a Windows 2000 platform, and I'm not trying to create Windows usernames, but rather simple names and passwords in a textfile...