Looking to convert file to correct case

bryank

I cannot find an answer to this and did search ... sorry🙂

I have a file with names in it as follows:

SMITH
JOHNSON
WILSON

etc., etc.

I'd like to convert the file so that only the first letter is capitalized as follows:

Smith
Johnson
Wilson

I've tried various things with the strtolower function to no avail. Anyone know of a quick script that does this?

nosix

take a look at the function ucwords

Make sure to read the user comments as well as they might contain a snipplet of code you can study.

bryank

I did see that but I think my issue is in the loop. I think I'm stuck reading the file in and trying to update it line by line using a foreach statement.

xblue

there's no function to write something to a specific line in a file, since internally a newline is just a character as any other.

instead:


// read file content, e.g. with 
$lines=file($filename); 
// (reads line by line into an array)

// modify the content, e.g.:
for ($i=0; $i<count($lines); $i++) {
    $lines[$i] = ucwords(strtolower($lines[$i]));
}

// open file for writing
$fp=fopen($filename, 'w');

// write modified content to file
fwrite($fp, implode('', $lines));

// close file:
fclose($fp);

I hope this gives you an idea. also make sure you have read and write permission for that file.

[EDIT: sorry, mixed things up, you don't need fopen() and fclose() when you work with file(). I changed the code to correct this.]
[EDIT: more corrections needed :S, but I really hope it is correct now.]

bryank

When running your code on the command line I get the following error:

./convert.php: ?php: No such file or directory
./convert.php: =: command not found
./convert.php: //: is a directory
./convert.php: syntax error near unexpected token ($' ./convert.php: ./convert.php: line 6:$lines = file ($filename); '

Here is the code to convert.php:

<?php

$filename = "/path/to/last_names.txt";

// read file content, e.g. with 
$lines = file ($filename); 
// (reads line by line into an array)

// modify the content, e.g.:
for ($i=0; $i<count($lines); $i++) {
    $lines[$i]=ucwords($lines[$i];
}

// open file for writing
$fp = fopen ($filename, 'w');

// write modified content to file
fwrite ($fp, impode('', $lines));

// close file:
fclose ($fp);

?>

???

xblue

there was a typo: closing parenthesis missing here
$lines[$i]=ucwords($lines[$i]);

hope that's all 😉 the example was just to give you an idea how you'd do that, no ready-to-copy-and-paste-and-run code.

bryank

Sorry, you put it together so quickly I thought it was good to go🙂

I made the correction you noted but get the same error referencing line 6?

xblue

sorry for not responding earlier.

now I've had time to test it, and after correction of a few more errors (mispelled 'implode' and also forgot to use lowercase before ucwords - I will correct this my example code), this works fine for me.

carefully check path, filename and permission, that all I can recommend from here. you might want to add some error checking as well.

bryank

Actually I changed this line:

$lines[$i]=strtolower(ucwords($lines[$i]));

to:

$lines[$i]=ucwords(strtolower($lines[$i]));

As your's was lowercasing everything including the first letter of the name. I wanted the first letter capitalized only. Thanks a lot for your help, this works fine. I had a script done in Perl that worked but I'm trying to learn PHP thoroughly so I can use it to do all of this🙂

xblue

I must have had a really bad day, I managed to place a horrible lot of errors into these few lines of code, even adding some when correcting others.🙁

glad it did work out for you in the end however.