Thread

I’m trying to do something similar to getting the first letter of a user’s screen name.

Does anybody know if it is possible to do something like this?:

<?php echo substr({screen_name},0,1); ?>

I’m using EE16.8 and the PHP is being parsed on input.

Thanks guys

This should work:

<?php echo substr("{screen_name}",0,1); ?>

Thanks gareth

I found that I could do it in the SQL statement too.

{exp:query sql='SELECT LEFT(m_field_id_1,1) AS first_letter FROM exp_member_data'} 
{first_letter}
{/exp:query}

I’ve ran into another problem. I want to have the single letter in upper case so tried this:

<?php 
    $upperCaseChar = strtoupper("{first_letter}"); 
    echo $upperCaseChar;
?>

But all it outputs is {FIRST_LETTER} in uppercase. Presumeably this is because the php is being parsed before the EE query?

Not to worry. I modified my SQL statement to this:

{exp:query sql='SELECT UPPER(LEFT(m_field_id_1,1)) AS first_letter FROM exp_member_data'} 
{first_letter}
{/exp:query}