Question

Ok, here’s an easy one:

I have a table in MySQL where I keep some country names (inserted by the user). The “problem” is that some of the users inserted the country name having no first capital letter.

A need a script (query+PHP) that selects all the values from 1 column inside the table, and apply a PHP script that makes the first letter of every word a capital letter, and the rest in small letter.

Example:
Before edit:

Name oNe
cOUNTRY
VaLue
value

After edit:

Name One
Country
Value
Value

I want to know two things:
->easiest way to edit a value inside a mySQL table
->easiest PHP way to capitalize the first letter of every word (space separated) inside a script

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use this function:

DELIMITER $$

DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `ICap`$$

CREATE FUNCTION `ICap`(mystring varchar(1000))
    RETURNS VARCHAR(1000)
BEGIN

DECLARE i INT DEFAULT 1;
DECLARE myc, pc CHAR(1);
DECLARE myoutstring VARCHAR(1000) DEFAULT LOWER(mystring);

WHILE i <= CHAR_LENGTH(mystring) DO
    SET myc = SUBSTRING(mystring, i, 1);
    SET pc = CASE WHEN i = 1 THEN ' ' ELSE SUBSTRING(mystring, i - 1, 1) END;
    IF pc IN (' ', '&', '''', '_', '?', ';', ':', '!', ',', '-', '/', '(', '.') THEN
        SET myoutstring = INSERT(myoutstring, i, 1, UPPER(myc));
    END IF;
    SET i = i + 1;
END WHILE;

RETURN myoutstring;

END$$

DELIMITER ;

After that, you can retrieve results like this:

SELECT 
  ICap(name)
FROM
  MyTable 

or just update all the rows:

UPDATE 
  MyTable
SET 
  name = ICap(name)