Question

i’m working on class names and i need to check if there is any upper camel case name and break it this way:

 "UserManagement" becomes "user-management"  

or

 "SiteContentManagement" becomes "site-content-management"

after extensive search i only found various use of ucfirst, strtolower,strtoupper, ucword and i can’t see how to use them to suit my needs any ideas?

thanks for reading 😉

Answer 1

You can use preg_replace to replace any instance of a lowercase letter followed with an uppercase with your lower-dash-lower variant:

$dashedName = preg_replace('/([^A-Z-])([A-Z])/', '$1-$2', $className);

Then followed by a strtolower() to take care of any remaining uppercase letters:

return strtolower($dashedName);

The full function here:

function camel2dashed($className) {
  return strtolower(preg_replace('/([^A-Z-])([A-Z])/', '$1-$2', $className));
}

---

To explain the regular expression used:

/        Opening delimiter
(        Start Capture Group 1
  [^A-Z-]   Character Class: Any character NOT an uppercase letter and not a dash
)        End Capture Group 1
(        Start Capture Group 2
  [A-Z]    Character Class: Any uppercase letter
)        End Capture Group 2
/        Closing delimiter

As for the replacement string

$1  Insert Capture Group 1
-   Literal: dash
$2  Insert Capture Group 2