I am an online merchant, and I am planning to open a merchant account so that
I can accept credit cards over the web. I plan to use Authorize.net's
"AIM" gateway interface
(http://www.authorize.net/support/AIM_guide.pdf).

The AIM manual specifies that the merchant must collect customer
billing info and then pass it through the interface. This interface
expects the customer's name broken into two
fields: x_first_name and x_last_name. However, as I look around the
web, I see that most merchant "checkout" pages ask for "Cardholder
name" in one text field. I believe that most of these merchants are
using Authorize.net, which I think has a large share of the market.

My question is: If most online merchants collect a single name value,
but then pass separate first and last names through AIM, what is the
common practice for splitting the name into two?

I am looking for a method that correctly handles extra spaces or
initials in the name, and that merchants have successfully used in the
field.

I found this related thread
(http://pear.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=3792), but it doesn't answer my
question.

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Clarification of Question by motravo-ga on 30 Jan 2006 08:31 PST

If you can provide some evidence that those merchants with a single
"cardholder name" field are using a different gateway, such as
Verisign's PayFlow Pro, I'll accept that as well.

There are a couple different ways of going about it.

You could split up the name using spaces as the "delimiter" and toss
it into an array.  The last item in the array would be the last name,
everything you'd put for first name. (If you are using PHP5 there is a
new function called str_split which does exactly this)

or

There are php functions which work on strings, such as:
substr() returns the portion of string
http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/function.substr.php

There is also:
strrchr --  Find the last occurrence of a character in a string 
http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/function.strrchr.php

The easiest thing would be to just change your side of things so you
collect the person's billing name in 2 fields instead of one.

Thanks for the response. I think you are right...I will probably just
split the field into first and last. However, the fact that most of
the big merchants (amazon, etc) take a single field tells me that they
must be going using Verisign's gateway.