How do I display the first letter as uppercase?

Question

I have fname and lname in my database, and a name could be stored as JOHN DOE or john DOE or JoHN dOE, but ultimately I want to display it as John Doe

fname being John and lname being Doe

Answer 1

Be aware that there are other capitalisation formats, such as John McDoe, John D'Oe, John de O, and John van den Doe.

Answer 2

seeing it is tagged PHP:
either

string ucfirst ( string $str );

to uppercase first letter of the first word

or

string ucwords ( string $str );

to uppercase the first letter of every word

you might want to use those in combination with

string strtolower ( string $str );

to normalize all names to lower case first.

Answer 3

I'm not sure where and how you want to display it, but if it's on a web-page you might try simply altering the display using CSS. Try adding:

text-transform:capitalize;

to the relevant rule, like this:

.name { text-transform:capitalize;}

if you put the name in a div or span with class="name". Of course, this will not in any way alter the database entry, but I wasn't clear which was preferable.