Question

How do I take a string and convert it to lower or upper case in Ruby?

Answer 1

Ruby has a few methods for changing the case of strings. To convert to lowercase, use downcase:

"hello James!".downcase    #=> "hello james!"

Similarly, upcase capitalizes every letter and capitalize capitalizes the first letter of the string but lowercases the rest:

"hello James!".upcase      #=> "HELLO JAMES!"
"hello James!".capitalize  #=> "Hello james!"
"hello James!".titleize    #=> "Hello James!" (Rails/ActiveSupport only)

If you want to modify a string in place, you can add an exclamation point to any of those methods:

string = "hello James!"
string.downcase!
string   #=> "hello james!"

Refer to the documentation for String for more information.