upper case initials not working

[Joey_2007]

Hello everyone,

I am working on a page which extracts the person's first and last name from a database as: "Smith, John".

I had some unsual last names like "van Berggen" and I have managed to get the php code working for those:

		$lastName_temp = strtolower($data_array[$i][1]);

                    $string_part_found = 0;

		$pos = strpos($lastName_temp,"van ");
		if($pos === 0) {
			$lastName_temp = substr($lastName_temp,4);
			$lastName_temp = "van ".ucfirst($lastName_temp);
			$string_part_found = 1;
		}

My challenge is now to ensure the few "odd" first names are rendered correctly. For example: Joe W. Smith, or Tim W.A. Luw Nilly

So I tried a variation of the code I used for the last name:

        $firstName_temp = strtolower($data_array[$i][0]);
		$pos = strpos($firstName_temp," s");
		if($pos === 0) {
			$firstName_temp = substr($firstName_temp,3);
			$firstName_temp = " S".ucfirst($firstName_temp);
			$string_part_found = 1;
		}

I know the the first name's variable is = 0. But, no luck. No change at all is visible. I really thought it would work but somehow I am missing some part. That is where I need the help.

I even tried the straight forward replace:

        $firstName_temp = str_ireplace(" s.", " S.", $firstName_temp); 

but that also hasn't worked.

For the short term I just need to change these two names.

Any ideas. Many thanks!

Joey

[NogDog]

I think I'd probably convert the values with [man]ucwords[/man] first, then handle special cases like "von Richthofen" with preg_replace:

$lastName = "VON richtHOFen";
$lastName = ucwords(strtolower($lastName));
$lastName = preg_replace('/^Von\s+(.+)/', 'von \\1', $lastName);
echo $lastName;

[Joey_2007]

for your quick response.

I will try to re-work the existing code to use the "preg_replace" instead and see how it goes.

I suppose I can just make one section for the last_name version and one section for the first_name verison.

Many thanks

Joey