Oracle PL/SQL Programming, Third Edition

Name

NLS_INITCAP

Synopsis

The NLS_INITCAP function uppercases the first letter of each word in a string, just as the INITCAP function does. NLS_INITCAP also allows you to specify a linguistic sorting sequence that affects the definition of “first letter.” The syntax for using NLS_INITCAP is:

NLS_INITCAP(string1, [, 'NLS_SORT=sort_sequence_name'])

The following example illustrates the difference between INITCAP and NLS_INITCAP:

BEGIN
   DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(INITCAP('ijzer'));
   DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(NLS_INITCAP('ijzer','NLS_SORT=XDUTCH'));
END;

The output is:

Ijzer
IJzer

In the Dutch language, the character sequence “ij” is treated as a single character. NLS_INITCAP correctly recognizes this as a result of the NLS_SORT specification, and uppercases the word “ijzer” (Dutch for “iron”) appropriately.

NLS_INITCAP returns a VARCHAR2 value. The inputs can be from any character set.