Question

I’m trying to get the following function to return an altered username with a number appended. The number should increment by one for each of the identical usernames. I’m calling the wordpress function username_exists() to check for matches. Please help. Thanks

function change_username($name) {

  $q = username_exists($name);
  $i = 0;

   do {
       $name = $name . $i++;
   } while ($q);

   return $name;
}

Answer 1

You cannot “save” the result of the calculation. In addition, you have to keep the fixed part of the name stored separately. Do both by using a while loop instead like this:

$baseName = $name;
$i = 0;

while(username_exists($name)) {
    $name = $baseName . (++$i);
}

return $name;