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How do I lowercase a string in C? [closed]
5 answers
I have a char foo[SIZE]; //(string)
and have inputed it correctly using %s
(as in it printfs
the correct input), but now want to set it to lowercase. So I tried using
if (isupper(*foo))
*foo=tolower(*foo);
ie when I do:
printf("%s" foo); //I get the same text with upper case
The text does not seem to change. Thank you.
foo
isn't a pointer, so you don't want to use it as one. You also don't have to check whether a character is an upper-case letter before using tolower
-- it converts upper to lower case, and leaves other characters unchanged. You probably want something like:
for (i=0; foo[i]; i++)
foo[i] = tolower((unsigned char)foo[i]);
Note that when you call tolower
(and toupper
, isalpha
, etc.) you really need to cast your input to unsigned char
. Otherwise, many (most?) characters outside the basic English/ASCII character set will frequently lead to undefined behavior (e.g., in a typical case, most accented characters will show up as negative numbers).
As an aside, when you're reading the string, you don't want to use scanf
with %s
-- you always want to specify the string length, something like: scanf("%19s", foo);
, assuming SIZE
== 20 (i.e., you want to specify one less than the size. Alternatively, you could use fgets
, like fgets(foo, 20, infile);
. Note that with fgets
, you specify the size of the buffer, not one less like you do with scanf
(and company like fscanf).
Try this
for(i = 0; foo[i]; i++){
foo[i] = tolower(foo[i]);
}
*foo=tolower(*foo); //doing *(foo+i) or foo[i] does not work either
because all of those options do not make sense
You should use it like this:
for(i = 0; foo[i] != '\0'; i++){
foo[i] = tolower(foo[i]);
}