Generating Logins

Hello, I want to be able to generate a User Name given the First Name and Last Name. I want the User Name to be the first initial of the first name and the first 7 characters of the last name for a total of 8 characters. Right now I have the following: $USER_NAME = substr($FIRST_NAME, 0, 1); $USER_NAME .= substr($LAST_NAME, 0, 7); In most cases, that works fine. However, if someone has a last name such as "O'Donnell", then the generated $USER_NAME will equal ko'donne when I would rather have it be kodonnel. How do I get it to ignore the ' character in the last name when generating a user name? Thanks, Rohan :-)