Hello folks-

I'm going to be trying to perform a task that I'm not sure if it's possible,
so i'm not looking for someone to write it for me, I just wanted to know if
something similar had already been written that I could get some perspective
from. Thank you in advance if you can point me to this!

I have a list of existing users (20,000+) in our application - and when new
users come in, we have to see if they already exist in the system by matching
name and 'group' - and if they do, we would assign them their existing id, if
we don't, we would assign them a new id.

The ids are generated simply by using first initial and last name, (I.E.
JSmith for John Smith) and if there is already a "jsmith" then we would
append with a 1 to make it "jsmith1" and so on. (jsmith2, jsmith3, etc.)

Does anyone know of any existing code written to perform this task that I
could user for inspiration?

Thank you!