How to determine if there is one or more space in front of array

[mikie46]

I searched the net for 2days looking for this answer. For what seems like a fairly easy solution i have been unable to come up with one.

I have a form that allows a user to enter an username or multiple user names separated by a comma. Out of that, i construct email addresses based on the users input.

The user would enter: mary,joe,sue and the result would produce

[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

However, there is one restriction. The user many only separate each entry with a comma, no spaces allowed so if the user enters

mary, joe,sue then only

mary@domain would be accepted

and all other usernames would be rejected. This means i would need to spit the input based on "," and then check to see if any of the remaining entries have 1 or more spaces in front of them. If they do, i get out of the loop.

The problem is, how do i determine if there is one or more spaces in front of the arrray variable? I tried strpos but that did not work. I could not find any other solution.

Here is what i have so far;

      $aliases = split("\,","$username");
      foreach ($aliases as $alias)
      {

Check $alias to see if it has one or more space in front of it. If it has, discard.

Anyone know what i can use? I dont want to trim it, simply reject.

Thanks

[tekky]

you should be able to do...

if(strpos($var," ") == 0) {
  //line starts with a space...
}

incidently... since you dont want spaces period... trim your initial value, then strpos for spaces (so you dont pick up a leading or trailing space on the initial form submission) and if you find one... reject the data...

[NogDog]

Another alternative if you want to "fix" the input rather than reject it:

$aliases = preg_split('/\s*,\s*/', trim($username));

This should take care of all leading and traling white-space for each username.

[Weedpacket]

tekky wrote:

if(strpos($var," ") == 0) {

Watch the typo; it ought to be "===" - otherwise you'll get false positives if the string contains no spaces at all. Looking at it from the other direction: instead of looking for a space and seeing if it's at the start of the string, you could look at the start of the string and see if it's a space.

if($var[0]==' '){

NogDog wrote:

Another alternative if you want to "fix" the input rather than reject it:

Yet another alternative "fix" would be to separate the usernames and then trim them all.

$aliases = array_map('trim', explode(',', $username));

(Incidentally, as noted on the [man]split[/man] manual page, [man]explode[/man] is a much better choice for this situation).

[mikie46]

NogDog wrote:

Another alternative if you want to "fix" the input rather than reject it:

$aliases = preg_split('/\s*,\s*/', trim($username));

This should take care of all leading and traling white-space for each username.

Yes this is a solution but an error gets sent to the user if any spaces occur in the input between commas and only the first username is accepted so in order to comply with the error i need to reject everything after the comma that has a space in it.

[mikie46]

Thank you, this code

if(strpos($var," ") !== 0) {

works.