Find user by email

Question

How can I look up a user by email? I thought that JTable::load would do it, but it returns a weird data shape:

$user = JTable::getInstance('User', 'JTable', array());
$user->load(array("email" => "someemail@gmail.com"));
print_r(json_encode($user))

            groups": null,
            "id": {
                "email": "someemail@gmail.com"
            },
            "name": "",
            "username": "",
            "email": "",
            ...

JTable::load works like this for Categories, however.

$cat = JTable::getInstance('Category', 'JTable', array());
$cat->load(array("title" => "some title"));

Do I have to use JFactory::getDbo()?

Answer 1

Joomla\CMS\Table\User::load() can only load rows by user ID. Use database query to get user ID by email and pass it to table's load() method:

$db = JFactory::getDbo();
$query = $db->getQuery(true)
    ->select($db->quoteName('id'))
    ->from($db->quoteName('#__users'))
    ->where($db->quoteName('email') . ' = ' . $db->quote($email));
$db->setQuery($query);

if ($id = $db->loadResult())
{
    $user = JTable::getInstance('User', 'JTable', array());
    $user->load($id);
}
else
{
    // User with specified $email not found.
}

If you don't intend changing user data in the table, you can use JFactory::getUser() instead:

if ($id = $db->loadResult())
{
    $user = JFactory::getUser($id);
}