PHP Capitalize String Functions - Change the case of a string

With PHP you can perform a number of capitalization or case-changing operations on strings. You can capitalize all the letters in a string, the first letters of words only, or even the first letter of a string only.

You can also convert parts of a string to lowercase if that is what you need to do.

The PHP capitalization tutorial below will help to get you familiar with the various capitalization and de-capitalization operations.

PHP Capitalize the first character of a string

To capitalize the first character of a string (in other words: make it uppercase), we use the ucfirst function. Look at the code below:

<?php
 
$string = "i love tutorial arena so much";
 
$result = ucfirst($string);
 
echo $string;
echo '<br />';
echo $result;
 
?>

The output is:

As we can see, the first character of the string has been capitalized.

PHP Capitalize the first character of each word in a string

To capitalize the first character of each word in a string, we use the ucwords function. Look at the code below:

<?php
 
$string = "i love tutorial arena so much";
 
$result = ucwords($string);
 
echo $string;
echo '<br />';
echo $result;
 
?>

The output is:

As we can see, the first character of each word in the string has been capitalized.

PHP Capitalize an entire string - Convert it to uppercase

To capitalize an entire string, we use the strtoupper function. Look at the code below:

<?php
 
$string = "i love tutorial arena so much";
 
$result = strtoupper($string);
 
echo $string;
echo '<br />';
echo $result;
 
?>

The output is:

As we can see, the entire string has been capitalized.

Convert an entire string to lowercase

We use the strtolower function to make an entire string lowercase. Look at the code below:

<?php
 
$string = "I LoVe tUtoRIAl ARENA SO MUCH";
 
$result = strtolower($string);
 
echo $string;
echo '<br />';
echo $result;
 
?>

The output is:

As we can see, the entire string has been converted to lowercase.

Whether you want to change strings to uppercase, to lowercase, or even capitalize every word in a string, it is easily accomplished using PHP capitalization functions. We hope this PHP tutorial was helpful.