Perl uc, lc, ucfirst and lcfirst functions

Function uc() returns an uppercase version of the string that you give it. For example, if you say something like:

$name = uc("Hello");
print $name; # this will prints 'HELLO'

$name = ucfirst("hello");
print $name; # prints "Hello";

If we note absence of head, tail and truncate functions in Perl.  To increase usefulness of the function like ucfirst it might make sense slightly generalize it to provide the possibility to capitalize not only the first letter but any substring by providing second and third arguments.

Symmetrically lc() and lcfirst() return lowercased versions of strings. lc returns all lowercase. Function lcfirst() makes the first character uncapitalized -- sometimes useful for names, but again this is a very limited application and probably function needs some generalization.

One frequent use of ucfirst and lc is to get a capitalized word:

$word=ucfirst(lc($word);

This combination of ucfirst with lc is useful for other string formatting tasks. For example, let's assume that we need to format a string as a title (with each word starting with a capital letter). Here is a very simple solution for this problem:

@words=split(/\s+/,$title);
foreach $w (@words) {
   $w=ucfirst(lc($w) # we are using side effect of foreach loop
} 
$title=join(' ',@words);

Usually articles like "a" and "the" are not capitalized in titles so we can modify the code to accomplish this in the following way:

@words=split(/\s+/,lc($title));
foreach $w (@words) {  
   next if ($w eq 'a' || $w eq 'the');    
   $w=ucfirst($w);
} 
$title=join(' ',@words);

You can use iether  lc and uc functions or the \L and \U string escapes is double quotes literals.

use locale;                     # needed in 5.004 or above

$big = uc($little);             # "bo peep" -> "BO PEEP"
$little = lc($big);             # "JOHN"    -> "john"
$big = "\U$little";             # "bo peep" -> "BO PEEP"
$little = "\L$big";             # "JOHN"    -> "john"

To alter just one character, use the lcfirst and ucfirst functions or the \l and \u string escapes.

$big = "\u$little";             # "bo"      -> "Bo"
$little = "\l$big";             # "BoPeep"    -> "boPeep" 

The functions and string escapes look different, but both do the same thing. You can set the case of either the first character or the whole string. You can even do both at once to force uppercase on initial characters and lowercase on the rest.

The use locale directive tells Perl's case-conversion functions and pattern matching engine to respect your language environment, allowing for characters with diacritical marks, and so on. A common mistake is to use tr/// to convert case. (the old Camel book recommended tr/A-Z/a-z/ which is wrong.) This won't work in all situations because when you say tr/A-Z/a-z/ you have omitted all characters with umlauts, accent marks, cedillas, and other diacritics used in dozens of languages, including English. The uc and \U case-changing commands understand these characters and convert them properly, at least when you've said use locale. (An exception is that in German, the uppercase form of ъ is SS, but it's not in Perl.)

use locale;                     # needed in 5.004 or above

$beast   = "dromedary";
# capitalize various parts of $beast
$capit   = ucfirst($beast);         # Dromedary
$capit   = "\u\L$beast";            # (same)
$capall  = uc($beast);              # DROMEDARY
$capall  = "\U$beast";              # (same)
$caprest = lcfirst(uc($beast));     # dROMEDARY
$caprest = "\l\U$beast";            # (same)

These capitalization changing escapes are commonly used to make the case in a string consistent:

# capitalize each word's first character, downcase the rest
$text = "thIS is a loNG liNE";
$text =~ s/(\w+)/\u\L$1/g;
print $text;
This Is A Long Line

You can also use their functional forms to do case-insensitive comparison:

if (uc($a) eq uc($b)) {
    print "a and b are the same\n";
}

The randcap program shown below, randomly capitalizes 20 percent of the letters of its input. 

#!/usr/bin/perl -p
# randcap: filter to randomly capitalize 20% of the letters
# call to srand() is unnecessary in 5.004
BEGIN { srand(time() ^ ($$ + ($$ << 15))) }
sub randcase { rand(100) < 20 ? "\u$_[0]" : "\l$_[0]" }
s/(\w)/randcase($1)/ge;

% randcap < genesis | head -9
boOk 01 genesis

001:001 in the BEginning goD created the heaven and tHe earTh.
 
001:002 and the earth wAS without ForM, aND void; AnD darkneSS was
 upon The Face of the dEEp. and the spIrit of GOd movEd upOn
 tHe face of the Waters.

001:003 and god Said, let there be ligHt: and therE wAs LigHt.

A more interesting approach would have been to take advantage of Perl's ability to use bitwise operators on strings:

sub randcase {
    rand(100) < 20 ? ("\040" ^ $1) : $1
}

That would, in 20 percent of the cases, switch the case of the letter. However, this misbehaves on 8-bit characters. The original randcase program had the same problem, but applying use locale would have easily fixed it.

This example of bitwise string operations quickly strips off all the high bits on a string:

$string &= "\177" x length($string);

Again, they'll be talking about you all over Europe, and not in the most glowing of terms, if you force all strings to seven bits.

Tip

lc function can be used to make operation of index function not case dependent.

See Also

The uc, lc, ucfirst, and lcfirst functions in perlfunc (1) and Chapter 3 of Programming Perl; the \L, \U, \l, and \u string escapes in the "Quote and Quote-like Operators" section of perlop (1) and Chapter 2 of Programming Perl

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