PHP Cookbook

1.6. Controlling Case

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:

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>

Discussion

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 ...