Easily Generate Displayable Username From Email in Laravel 2024

Have you ever run into a situation where you need to create a displayable username from email address in Laravel? Maybe during registration or for profile displays? I know I have! Extracting a username from an email can be handy, but we need to do some cleanup to make it look nice.

In this post, we’ll explore a simple function we can use to generate a displayable username from an email address using Laravel’s awesome Str class.

And if you ever need to calculate a user’s age from their birthday in Laravel, check out How To Easily Calculate Age From Birthday in Laravel with Carbon

Laravel Str Class

Laravel’s Str class offers a bunch of useful methods for working with strings. Here, we’ll leverage a few of them to transform an email address into a username.

Generate Displayable Username From Email

Let’s jump into the code and see how this magic happens:

function generateUsername (string $email) {
  return Str::of($email)
    ->before('@') // Grab everything before the "@" symbol
    ->replace('/[0-9]+/', '') // Remove any numbers
    ->replace('/\.+/', ' ') // Replace consecutive dots with a single space
    ->headline(); // Capitalize the first letter of each word
}

echo generateUsername('harry.potter@gmail.com'); // Outputs: Harry Potter

Let’s break down what each bit of code does:

• Str::of($email): We start by converting the email address to a Str object using Str::of().
• ->before('@'): This method grabs the part of the email address that comes before the “@” symbol. This is typically the username portion.
• ->replace('/[0-9]+/', ''): Regular expressions come in handy here! This line removes any sequences of numbers from the username using replace(). We don’t want usernames like “john.doe123”.
• ->replace('/\.+/', ' '): Another helpful replace() method. This one targets consecutive dots (periods) and replaces them with a single space. This takes care of emails like “jo.anna.smith@…” and turns them into “Jo Anna Smith”.
• ->headline(): Finally, we use the headline() method to capitalize the first letter of each word in the username. This gives us a username that looks presentable, like “Harry Potter”.

Conclusion

By leveraging the Str class and its powerful methods, we can easily create a function to generate displayable usernames from email addresses. This can be a handy tool for various user management functionalities within your application.