Why are we being forced to enter a player's entire name?

I've been making admin tools for a while now (I make BC2CC for Bad Company 2) and since day one we have required very few characters to ascertain the proper player.

If you've got a player in your server with a long or difficult to type name, it's almost sadistic that we have to type it in perfectly. I haven't inspected how it's done programmatically, but it seems like it's just using a straight up equals() comparison when it should be matching startswith() or contains(). If the plugin has low confidence, return a message saying the name was too ambiguous to be certain and to increase the complexity of the characters supplied.

Anybody oppose this?

Edit: I'm aware some plugins do it right. Just thinking that with Bukkit being "new and improved" we could all agree upon a proper method of ascertaining a player from the list.

 

Agreeing, here. This was one of the things hMod got right and it shouldn't be too hard to implement.

 

My work was done in C# using LINQ. Does Java extend any similar functions? Regardless, it's easy. Just for the sake of discussion here's how I do it and my users love it.

PHP:

        internal static string GetPlayerName(IEnumerable<Player> playerList, string playerName)
        {
            var player = (playerList.Where(p => p.PlayerName.ToLower().Contains(playerName.ToLower())));

            if (player != null && player.Count() == 1)
            {
                return Enumerable.FirstOrDefault(player).PlayerName;
            }
            return null;
        }

 

Craftbukkit got updated for partial naming 2 hours ago.

https://github.com/Bukkit/CraftBukkit/commit/c46ea34c91fcf80c8c54bf203c5a72a89cfa6550

 

"fail" what? I made this thread 3 hours ago. Maybe it was a reminder to commit the changes.

 

Apologies. I edited my post before you even replied.

 

Oh -- no worries.