Hello!

I'm currently doing some work that requires a mySQL database of actor names. For all my actors, I have three columns; first_name, last_name and between_name. Because between_name can be written in many ways ("Peter van Wibble" or "Fred d'Angelo), and the French have a habit of writing their surnames in capitals, I wrote a little function to prepare the actor names for output:

<?
function actor_name($last,$middle,$first) {
// because we have so many different name combinations, write out a string
// that does capitalisation and the like properly (hopefully)
// ex: actor_name("ANGELO","d'","Jean-Pierre") = Jean-Pierre d'Angelo

// strtolower() everything because ucwords() doesn't work on mixed case
$last=strtolower($last);
$middle=strtolower($middle);
$first=strtolower($first);

// split hyphenated names so we can ucwords() them
if (strpos($last,"-")) {
$lasthyphen=true;
$last=ereg_replace("-"," ",$last);
} else { $lasthyphen=false; }

if (strpos($first,"-")) {
$firsthyphen=true;
$first=ereg_replace("-"," ",$first);
} else { $firsthyphen=false; }

// if the "middle" name doesn't end with an apostrophe, add a space and
// lowercase it just in case someone's mis-typed it
if (!strrpos($middle,"'")) {
$middle.=" ";
}

$last=ucwords($last);
$first=ucwords($first);

if ($lasthyphen==true) { $last=ereg_replace(" ","-",$last); }
if ($firsthyphen==true) { $first=ereg_replace(" ","-",$first); }

return htmlentities("$first $middle$last");

}

?>

Thing is, I'm getting bizarre behaviour where some characters become modified in a way I don't like - in particular, when the letter L follows an E with a diaresis (Raphaël, for example) it becomes upper case. Suggestions, anyone?

And if anyone wants to make that code shorter and more readable, I'd appreciate it greatly. :-)

James.
xx


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