Use full name (firstname lastname) as username

OK, thanks for the reply, but that's not what I meant, need or asked about.

I want to simplify the registration process and login process as much as possible, make it as transparant as possible. Full name and email address would be enough. Good riddance BS usernames.

Apart from that, my question is a coding/syntax question. If I want to do this, how should I do it? Would adding

$username = $firstname $lastname

with the correct syntax do the trick? What would the correct syntax be?

Please, can any PHP-er give me a pointer on the correct syntax so I can at least try?

Or is there a way to search for the correct PHP syntax of these things? When I put "$username=" in a search engine the markup elelements are ignored and I get only irrelevant results about "username".

Thanks again Smartys! I'll give this a try.

But how can I get a space between first and last name? Something like this:

$username = '.$firstname.' '.$lastname.';

I looked at that, but it's not the same thing, is it? In that case I wanted to output from the database. In that case you call the field with something like "firstname".

In this case I want to equate "$username" with "$firstname $lastname" to submit data into the database. It's not at all obvious to me that these would require the same syntax and there are still many variations possible from the solution on that link to this situation.

Anyway, Smartys solution allowed me to test the principle, but only the firstname was entered as username. Edit: My mistake again. Should have used surname instead of lastname.

The solution works for me. I had to remove checks for the username. They are no longer needed, because using the real name kinda builds some checks in.

But I still need to figure out the right syntax. I'll try some variations...

Probably this?

$username = $firstname.' '.$lastname;

Yes, that works! Nice. Thanks a lot for the pointers. It saved me a lot of time puzzling.

I like this solution. It really simplifies the registration - just name and email. Any downsides I'm overlooking?

Thanks again.

This worked as well:

$username = $firstname.' '.$lastname;

Does 'db->escape' have advantages?