php

Partially hide email address in PHP

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I am building a simple friend/buddy system, and when someone tries to search for new friends, I want to show partially hidden email addresses, so as to give an idea about who the user might be, without revealing the actual details.

So I want abcdlkjlkjk@hotmail.com to become abcdl******@hotmail.com.

As a test I wrote:

<?php
$email = "abcdlkjlkjk@hotmail.com";

$em = explode("@",$email);
$name = $em[0];
$len = strlen($name);
$showLen = floor($len/2);
$str_arr = str_split($name);
for($ii=$showLen;$ii<$len;$ii++){
    $str_arr[$ii] = '*';
}
$em[0] = implode('',$str_arr); 
$new_name = implode('@',$em);
echo $new_name;

This works, but I was wondering if there was any easier/shorter way of applying the same logic? Like a regex maybe?

Answers

here's something quick:

function obfuscate_email($email)
{
    $em   = explode("@",$email);
    $name = implode('@', array_slice($em, 0, count($em)-1));
    $len  = floor(strlen($name)/2);

    return substr($name,0, $len) . str_repeat('*', $len) . "@" . end($em);   
}

// to see in action:
$emails = ['"Abc@def"@iana.org', 'abcdlkjlkjk@hotmail.com'];

foreach ($emails as $email) 
{
    echo obfuscate_email($email) . "n";
}

echoes:

"Abc*****@iana.org
abcdl*****@hotmail.com

uses substr() and str_repeat()

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

chepnertop

This is not a great method and doesn't check if the email exists but it checks if it looks like an email with the @ and domain extension.

function checkEmail($email) {
   $find1 = strpos($email, '@');
   $find2 = strpos($email, '.');
   return ($find1 !== false && $find2 !== false && $find2 > $find1);
}

$email = 'name@email.com';
if ( checkEmail($email) ) {
   echo $email . ' looks like a valid email address.';
}

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

martin_lear

$email_parts    = explode('@', $email);

// check if there is a "+" and return the string before
$before_plus    = strstr($email_parts[0], '+', TRUE);
$before_at      = $before_plus ? $before_plus : $email_parts[0];

// remove "."
$before_at      = str_replace('.', '', $before_at);

$email_clean    = $before_at.'@'.$email_parts[1];

Friday, November 11, 2022

hunterr

Here's what worked best for me when trying to script this (in case anyone else comes across this like I did):

$ pecl -d php_suffix=5.6 install <package>
$ pecl uninstall -r <package>

$ pecl -d php_suffix=7.0 install <package>
$ pecl uninstall -r <package>

$ pecl -d php_suffix=7.1 install <package>
$ pecl uninstall -r <package>

The -d php_suffix=<version> piece allows you to set config values at run time vs pre-setting them with pecl config-set. The uninstall -r bit does not actually uninstall it (from the docs):

vagrant@homestead:~$ pecl help uninstall
pecl uninstall [options] [channel/]<package> ...
Uninstalls one or more PEAR packages.  More than one package may be
specified at once.  Prefix with channel name to uninstall from a
channel not in your default channel (pecl.php.net)

Options:
  ...
  -r, --register-only
        do not remove files, only register the packages as not installed
  ...

The uninstall line is necessary otherwise installing it will remove any previously installed version, even if it was for a different PHP version (ex: Installing an extension for PHP 7.0 would remove the 5.6 version if the package was still registered as installed).

Monday, December 12, 2022

shankar_damodaran

Never used any of those, but they look interesting..

Take a look at Gearman as well.. more overhead in systems like these but you get other cool stuff :) Guess it depends on your needs ..

Friday, November 11, 2022

the_falvert

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