Maybe I'm mis-reading this but it sounds like you want to check the first character, and if it isn't uppercase, then make it uppercase. Though you list special cases, I can't see a case in which you would not make the first character uppercase, so why are you checking it at all? Just use ucfirst() (which leaves all the trailing characters unchanged) and be done with it, saving yourself the cycles needed for the test. Of course there are plenty of last names that start with lower case letters, e.g. von Neuman, so this is always going to be only a filter, not a test.

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser