WIldcard to ban user from posting

[mooler]

Hello
Very new to php and I want to block a user from posting in my Joomla site (akocomment component).

The user ( a spammer ) uses John 12345 as the name of the poster and I just what to hardcode the block into the code. The numbers after John alters so I need some kind of wildcard to prevent the spamming.

Tried this

$banjohn = "John"*;
if ($acname == $banjohn){
    echo "No spamming allowed!";
    exit;

but no go, the wildcard does not work, how would I go about to make it block the spammer?

[pbmods]

Heya, mooler. Welcome to TSDN!

Try using strpos().

[mooler]

Thanks for the reply

Would that just exlude all posters named John?

ie.


[PHP]$findme = 'John';
if (strpos($acname, $findme) {
echo "You are blocked!";
exit;
}[/PHP]

Or am I misinterpreting the strpos manual? It's the numbers I'm after.

Or could it be done like this

[PHP]$1 = "1";
$2 = "2";
$3 = "3";
$4 = "4";
//and so on
$findme = 'John',$1,$2,$3,$4;
if (strpos($acname, $findme) {
echo "You are blocked!";
exit;
}[/PHP]

[pbmods]

Heya, Mooler.

If you want to block all posters whose name starts with 'John', you'd do this:

if( strpos($acname, 'John') === 0 )
{
    // Banned!
}
 

This checks to see if $acname starts with 'John' (i.e., if 'John' starts at position zero of $acname).

Note that we use '===' here. This is because if strpos() doesn't find the target string in $acname, it will return false, which will evaluate to zero. This is not desirable, but by using '===' instead of '==', we only display the block message if strpos() returns the integer 0.

[mooler]

Ok thanks agiain.
Yes I want to block all users named John but only if it is followed by a space ( " ") followed number ie. Johan 23543

[PHP]$findme = "John"+1||2||3||4||5||6||7||8||9||0;

if (strpos($acname, $findme) {
echo "You are blocked!";
exit;
}[/PHP]

This should check $acname for John in position 0 followed by a number (right?). And if that is true return the echo message? Any user just named "John" will return a false?
Or will it just check the caracter after the string "John" and therfor the code has to include a " " to get it right?
Like this:

[PHP]$findme = "John"+" "+1||2||3||4||5||6||7||8||9||0;[/PHP]

Sorry for beeing abit anoying but I'm trying to learn how to thing using php. And thanks again for your patience!

[pbmods]

Heya, Mooler.

Ah. I see what you're getting at now. For that, you'll probably want to use a regular expression.

You want to block a string that matches this pattern:

1. Starts with 'john '
2. Followed by one or more numbers.
3. (and that's it)

Expressed as a regexp:

.  1    2 3
/^john \d+$/i
 

The 'i' makes it case-insensitive, so that it will match 'john 123', 'John 123' or even 'jOhN 654321'.

So how to integrate that into your code?

if( preg_match('/^john \\d+$/i', $acname) )
{
    echo 'Bl0x0ReD!';
    exit;
}
 

For more info about regular expressions, check out this site.

[mooler]

Yes! That's it! Thank you very much will read up on regular expressions. Thanks again.

[pbmods]

Heya, Mooler.

Glad to hear you got it working! Good luck with your project, and if you ever need anything, post back anytime :)