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.