First character upper case and ignore few special characters in php

Question

I am trying to dispaly upper case text to just the first character to be upper case in a phrase. If there are any special characters they have to be ignored.

for example:

SECTION 1: IDENTIFICATION OF THE SUBSTANCE/PREPARATION AND OF THE COMPANY/UNDERTAKING

the above is my text and I want the above text to display like

Section 1: Identification of the substance/preparation and of the company/undertaking

as of now I tried echo ucfirst(strtolower($word));

which outputs

Section 1: identification of the substance/preparation and of the company/undertaking

How can I achieve this? Thank you

Answer 1

You can split using : surrounded by optional spaced and call ucfirst on each split item and then join them together:

$out="";

foreach (preg_split('/(\h*[:.]\h*)/', strtolower($str), 0, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE) as $s)
   $out .= ucfirst($s)

echo "$out\n";

//=> Section 1: Identification of the substance/preparation and of the company/undertaking

\h*[:.]\h* splits on : or . with optional spaced on either side. You may add more characters here in character class that you want to split on.

Answer 2

You can split in two parts:

$exploded = explode(': ', $phrase);

then ucfirst each part:

$exploded[0] = ucfirst($exploded[0]);
$exploded[1] = ucfirst(strtolower($exploded[1]));

finally you can join all:

echo join(': ', $exploded);

---

$phrase = 'SECTION 1: CIAO MONDO';
$exploded = explode(': ', $phrase);
$exploded[0] = ucfirst($exploded[0]);
$exploded[1] = ucfirst(strtolower($exploded[1]));
echo join(': ', $exploded); // Section 1: Ciao mondo