preg_replace to capitalize a letter after a quote

I have names like this:

$str = 'JAMES "JIMMY" SMITH'

I run strtolower, then ucwords, which re开发者_StackOverflow中文版turns this:

$proper_str = 'James "jimmy" Smith'

I'd like to capitalize the second letter of words in which the first letter is a double quote. Here's the regexp. It appears strtoupper is not working - the regexp simply returns the unchanged original expression.

$proper_str = preg_replace('/"([a-z])/',strtoupper('$1'),$proper_str);

Any clues? Thanks!!

Probably the best way to do this is using preg_replace_callback():

$str = 'JAMES "JIMMY" SMITH';
echo preg_replace_callback('!\b[a-z]!', 'upper', strtolower($str));

function upper($matches) {
  return strtoupper($matches[0]);
}

You can use the e (eval) flag on preg_replace() but I generally advise against it. Particularly when dealing with external input, it's potentially extremely dangerous.

Use preg_replace_callback - But you dont need to add an extra named function, rather use an anonymous function.

$str = 'JAMES "JIMMY" SMITH';
echo preg_replace_callback('/\b[a-z]/', function ($matches) {
     return strtoupper($matches[0]);
}, strtolower($str));

Use of /e is be deprecated as of PHP 5.5 and doesn't work in PHP 7

Use the e modifier to have the substitution be evaluated:

preg_replace('/"[a-z]/e', 'strtoupper("$0")', $proper_str)

Where $0 contains the match of the whole pattern, so " and the lowercase letter. But that doesn’t matter since the " doesn’t change when send through strtoupper.

A complete solution doesn't get simpler / easier to read than this...

Code: https://3v4l.org/rrXP7

$str = 'JAMES "JIMMY" SMITH';
echo ucwords(strtolower($str), ' "');

Output:

James "Jimmy" Smith

It is merely a matter of declaring double quotes and spaces as delimiters in the ucwords() call.

Nope. My earlier self was not correct. It doesn't get simpler than this multibyte-safe title-casing technique!

Code: (Demo)

echo mb_convert_case($str, MB_CASE_TITLE);

Output:

James "Jimmy" Smith

I do this without regex, as part of my custom ucwords() function. Assuming no more than two quotes appear in the string:

$parts = explode('"', $string, 3); 
if(isset($parts[2])) $string = $parts[0].'"'.ucfirst($parts[1]).'"'.ucfirst($parts[2]);            
else if(isset($parts[1])) $string = $parts[0].'"'.ucfirst($parts[1]);   

You should do this :

$proper_str = 
    preg_replace_callback(
        '/"([a-z])/',
        function($m){return strtoupper($m[1]);},
        $proper_str
);

You should'nt use "eval()" for security reasons.

Anyway, the patern modifier "e" is deprecated. See : PHP Documentation.

echo ucwords(mb_strtolower('JAMES "JIMMY" SMITH', 'UTF-8'), ' "'); // James "Jimmy" Smith

ucwords() has a second delimiter parameter, the optional delimiters contains the word separator characters. Use space ' ' and " as delimiter there and "Jimmy" will be correctly recognized.