Question

I have been racking my brain around this for a few hours. Basically I have a div that displays user info from a database:

if (isset($_SESSION['email']) && ($_SESSION['userID'])) {

$sql = "SELECT * FROM user_accounts WHERE email='" . $_SESSION['email'] . "' AND user_id=" . $_SESSION['userID'] ;
$userRecordSet = $_dbConn->query($sql);

if ($userRecordSet != NULL) {
    $userRow = $userRecordSet->getrow();
    $firstName = $userRow['first_name'];
    $lastName = $userRow['last_name'];

    }

}

The first and last name are then placed into the div and displayed to the user.

<div id="nameChange" title="Click to edit"><?=$firstName?> <?=$lastName?></div>

when the user clicks on this DIV element it converts into a text box, and displays the contents of the user’s first and last name taken from the DIV. here is the Jquery to support the above.

//execute when nameChange DIV is clicked
        $("#nameChange").click(function(){  

                //check if there are any existing input elements
                if ($(this).children('input').length == 0){


                    $("#save").css("display", "inline");

                    //variable that contains input HTML to replace
                    var inputbox = "<input type='text' class='inputbox' name='userName' value=\""+$(this).text()+"\">"; 
                    //insert the HTML intp the div
                    $(this).html(inputbox);         

                    //automatically give focus to the input box     
                    $("this .inputbox").focus();


                }               
        });

Doing this creates an issue with the database because I want the first and last name to go into separate columns but after it is converted into a text box, the contents are placed into a single variable. now for the question.

how can I parse through the text box and assign 2 separate variables for the first and last name?

Answer 1

This assumes that your final parsing to the database is done with php.

here are two function I use to get the first and last name form a text input:

//returns first name form full name input
public function FirstName($input)
    {   
        $name = explode(" ",$input);
        $howmany = count($name);
        if($howmany != '1')
            {
            if($howmany == '2')
                {   
                    $firstname = $name[0];
                    return $firstname;
                }
                    if($howmany == '3')
                {   
                    $firstname = $name[0]." ".$name[1];
                    return $firstname;
                }
            }

        return false;   
    }
//returns last name from full name input
public function LastName($input)
    {   
        $name = explode(" ",$input);
        $howmany = count($name);
        if($howmany != '1')
            {   
                $last = $howmany -1;
                $lastname = $name[$last];
                return $lastname;
            }
        return false;   
    }

This takes into account people that have two first names such as ” mary lynn”