Changing to first upper case letter when the first character is a number

Question

I've done this in the past but no longer have what I wrote and can't remember how I did it previously. In correcting some user input, say "THIS IS AN ITEM" to "This is an item", I of course use

ucfirst(strtolower($text))

however it's no use when $text = "4 temperature controls"

I'm sure I had this sorted so "4 Temperature controls" was the output but can find no reference to ucfirst skipping non alphabet characters

Answer 1

Use regex for that:

$text   = "4 temperature controls";
$result = preg_replace_callback('/^([^a-z]*)([a-z])/', function($m)
{
   return $m[1].strtoupper($m[2]);
}, strtolower($text));

ucfirst() is simply not the use-case here, since it can not predict your following characters, it's working with first character always.

Answer 2

try this:

<?php 
$str = "4 temperature controls";
preg_match("~^(\d+)~", $str, $m);
$arr = explode($m[1],$str,2);
echo $m[1]." ".ucfirst(trim($arr[1]));

?>

Answer 3

There's might be a better way, but using a simple preg_match should work:

$text = "4 temperature controls";
$match = preg_match('/^([^a-zA-Z]*)(.*)$/', $text, $result);

$upper = ucfirst(mb_strtolower($result[2]));
echo $fixed = $result[1].$upper;