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.
Use ucfirst( )
or ucwords( )
to
capitalize
the first letter of one or more words:
print ucfirst("how do you do today?"); print ucwords("the prince of wales"); How do you do today? The Prince Of Wales
Use
strtolower( )
or strtoupper( )
to modify the case of entire strings:
print strtoupper("i'm not yelling!"); // Tags must be lowercase to be XHTML compliant print strtolower('<A HREF="one.php">one</A>'); I'M NOT YELLING! <a href="one.php">one</a>
Use ucfirst( )
to capitalize the first character
in a string:
print ucfirst('monkey face'); print ucfirst('1 monkey face'); Monkey face 1 monkey face
Note that the second line of output is not “1 Monkey face”.
Use ucwords( )
to capitalize the first character of each word in a
string:
print ucwords('1 monkey face'); print ucwords("don't play zone defense against the philadelphia 76-ers"); 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 nonfirst letters:
print ucfirst('macWorld says I should get a iBook'); print ucwords('eTunaFish.com might buy itunaFish.Com!'); MacWorld says I should get a 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:
print strtolower("I programmed the WOPR and the TRS-80."); print strtoupper('"since feeling is first" is a poem by e. e. cummings.'); 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.
For more information about locale settings, see Chapter 16; 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.
Get PHP Cookbook now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.