How to detect an aliases of a player name?

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#1

Hey developers, I have been making a kick command, and I wanted it so that you could only type the first 3, or 4 letters of the name, and the script would detect the rest.

Here is the script.

local kick = '-kick '
game.Players.PlayerAdded:Connect(function(plr)
	plr.Chatted:Connect(function(chat)
		if string.sub(chat, 1, string.len(kick)) == kick then
			local target = string.sub(chat, string.len(kick), string.len(kick) + 4)
			local players = game.Players:GetChildren()
			
			for _, v in pairs(players) do
				if string.sub(v, 1, 4) == target then
					v:Kick()
				end
			end
		end
	end)
end)

I have got 1 error in the output on this line:
Error: invalid argument #1 to 'sub' (string expected, got Instance)
Line:

if string.sub(v, 1, 4) == target then

Any help, tips or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

#2

The v in the pairs loop is a Player instance, not a string. Simply do v.Name.

#3

Works, but when I do -kick sele, it just prints ‘Player not found’ (because of the print if there is no player, not an error), any solutions?

#4

You’re almost there!

Regarding your error, that’s because you need to use v.Name instead of just v. However, there’s another problem: What if multiple players match? For instance, if you chat “-kick crazy” and there’s a “crazyman32” and a “crazydude64” in the game, it would just kick the first one it finds. Ideally, it should only work if there’s a single match.

Another couple improvements: Use string.match instead, and also make it non-case-sensitive.

You could rewrite it like this:

local kick = "%-kick (.+)"
game.Players.PlayerAdded:Connect(function(plr)
	plr.Chatted:Connect(function(chat)
		chat = chat:lower()
		-- Check if chat matches "-kick NAME"
		local matchPlrName = chat:match(kick)
		if matchPlrName then
			-- Collect matched players:
			local players = game.Players:GetChildren()
			local matchedPlayers = {}
			for _,v in ipairs(players) do
				if v.Name:lower():sub(1, #matchPlrName) == matchPlrName then
					table.insert(matchedPlayers, v)
				end
			end
			-- Only kick if it matched on one player:
			if #matchedPlayers == 1 then
				matchedPlayers[1]:Kick()
			end
		end
	end)
end)

And of course, you’ll want to make sure that only certain players are allowed to run this command. To create a simple permissions list, you could use a table like this:

local admins = {
	[1372033462] = true; -- Your user ID
	[308165] = true; -- My user ID
}
game.Players.PlayerAdded:Connect(function(plr)
	if admins[plr.UserId] then
		plr.Chatted:Connect(function(chat)
			-- ... other code
		end)
	end
end)
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