Uppercase the first character of each word in a string

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- PHP Manual
- String Functions
- Uppercase the first character of each word in a string

# ucwords

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

ucwords — Uppercase the first character of each word in a string

### Description

ucwords(string `$string`, string `$separators` = " \t\r\n\f\v"): string

Returns a string with the first character of each word in `string` capitalized, if that character is an ASCII character between `"a"` (0x61) and `"z"` (0x7a).

For this function, a word is a string of characters that are not listed in the `separators` parameter. By default, these are: space, horizontal tab, carriage return, newline, form-feed and vertical tab.

To do a similar conversion on multibyte strings, use mb_convert_case() with the `MB_CASE_TITLE` mode.

### Parameters

`string`

  The input string.

`separators`

  The optional `separators` contains the word separator characters.

### Return Values

Returns the modified string.

### Changelog

Version | Description
--- | ---
8.2.0 | Case conversion no longer depends on the locale set with setlocale(). Only ASCII characters will be converted.

### Examples

Example #1 ucwords() example

    <?php
    $foo = 'hello world!';
    $foo = ucwords($foo);             // Hello World!

    $bar = 'HELLO WORLD!';
    $bar = ucwords($bar);             // HELLO WORLD!
    $bar = ucwords(strtolower($bar)); // Hello World!
    ?>

Example #2 ucwords() example with custom delimiter

    <?php
    $foo = 'hello|world!';
    $bar = ucwords($foo);             // Hello|world!

    $baz = ucwords($foo, "|");        // Hello|World!
    ?>

Example #3 ucwords() example with additional delimiters

    <?php
    $foo = "mike o'hara";
    $bar = ucwords($foo);                 // Mike O'hara

    $baz = ucwords($foo, " \t\r\n\f\v'"); // Mike O'Hara
    ?>

### Notes

> Note: This function is binary-safe.

### See Also

- strtoupper() - Make a string uppercase
- strtolower() - Make a string lowercase
- ucfirst() - Make a string's first character uppercase
- mb_convert_case() - Perform case folding on a string