Convert string with dashes to camelCase

Question

I want to take a string like this: 'this-is-a-string' and convert it to this: 'thisIsAString':

function dashesToCamelCase($string, $capitalizeFirstCharacter = false) {     // Do stuff      return $string; } 

I need to convert "kebab-case" to "camelCase".

Answer 1

No regex or callbacks necessary. Almost all the work can be done with ucwords:

function dashesToCamelCase($string, $capitalizeFirstCharacter = false)  {      $str = str_replace(' ', '', ucwords(str_replace('-', ' ', $string)));      if (!$capitalizeFirstCharacter) {         $str[0] = strtolower($str[0]);     }      return $str; }  echo dashesToCamelCase('this-is-a-string'); 

If you're using PHP >= 5.3, you can use lcfirst instead of strtolower.

Update

A second parameter was added to ucwords in PHP 5.4.32/5.5.16 which means we don't need to first change the dashes to spaces (thanks to Lars Ebert and PeterM for pointing this out). Here is the updated code:

function dashesToCamelCase($string, $capitalizeFirstCharacter = false)  {      $str = str_replace('-', '', ucwords($string, '-'));      if (!$capitalizeFirstCharacter) {         $str = lcfirst($str);     }      return $str; }  echo dashesToCamelCase('this-is-a-string');