Problem You need to capitalize, lowercase, or otherwise modify the case of letters in a string. For example, you want to capitalize the initial letters of names but lowercase the rest. Solution Use ucfirst( ) or ucwords( ) to capitalize the first letter of one or more words, as shown in Example 1-25. Example 1-25. Capitalizing letters [sourcecode language="php"] <?php print ucfirst("how do you do today?"); print ucwords("the prince of wales"); ?> [/sourcecode] Example 1-25 prints: How do you do today? The Prince Of Wales Use strtolower( ) or strtoupper( ) to modify the case of entire strings, as in Example 1-26. Example 1-26. Changing case of strings print strtoupper("i'm not yelling!"); // Tags must be lowercase to be XHTML compliant print strtolower('one'); Example 1-26 prints: I'M NOT YELLING! one Discussion Use ucfirst( ) to capitalize the first character in a string: [sourcecode language="php"] <?php print ucfirst('monkey face'); print ucfirst('1 monkey face'); ?> [/sourcecode] This prints: Monkey face 1 monkey face Note that the second phrase is not “1 Monkey face.” Use ucwords( ) to capitalize the first character of each word in a string: This prints: 1 Monkey Face Don't Play Zone Defense Against The Philadelphia 76-ers As expected, ucwords( ) doesn’t capitalize the “t” in “don’t.” But it also doesn’t capitalize the “e” in “76-ers.” For ucwords( ), a word is any sequence of nonwhitespace characters that follows one or more whitespace characters. Since both ' and - aren’t whitespace characters, ucwords( ) doesn’t consider the “t” in “don’t” or the “e” in “76-ers” to be word-starting characters. Both ucfirst( ) and ucwords( ) don’t change the case of non-first letters: This prints:

MacWorld says I should get an iBook ETunaFish.com Might Buy ItunaFish.Com!

The functions strtolower( ) and strtoupper( ) work on entire strings, not just individual characters. All alphabetic characters are changed to lowercase by strtolower( ) and strtoupper( ) changes all alphabetic characters to uppercase: This prints:

i programmed the wopr and the trs-80. "SINCE FEELING IS FIRST" IS A POEM BY E. E. CUMMINGS.

When determining upper- and lowercase, these functions respect your locale settings. See Also For more information about locale settings, see Chapter 19; documentation on ucfirst( ) at http://www.php.net/ucfirst, ucwords( ) at http://www.php.net/ucwords, strtolower( ) at http://www.php.net/strtolower, and strtoupper( ) at http://www.php.net/strtoupper.