ucwords and french accented lettres encoding

Question

We have a database of Canadian addresses all in CAPS , the client requested that we transform to lower case expect the first letter and the letter after a '-'

So i made this function , but I'm having problem with french accented letters .

When having the file and charset as ISO-88591 It works fine , but when i try to make it UTF-8 it doesn't work anymore .

Example of input : 'damien-claude élanger' output : Damien-Claude élanger

the é in utf-8 will become �

 function cap_letter($string) {
            $lower     = str_split("àáâçèéêë");
            $caps      = str_split("ÀÁÂÇÈÉÊË");
            $letters   = str_split(strtolower($string));

            foreach($letters as $code => $letter) {
                if($letter === '-' || $letter === ' ') {
                    $position = array_search($letters[$code+1],$lower);
                    if($position !== false) {
                        // test
                        echo $letters[$code+1] . ' == ' . $caps[$position] ; 
                        $letters[$code+1] = $caps[$position];
                    }
                    else {
                        $letters[$code+1] = mb_strtoupper($letters[$code+1]);
                    } 
                }
            }
            //return ucwords(implode($letters)) ;
            return implode($letters) ;
        }

The Other solution i have in mind is to do : ucwords(strtolower($str)) since all the addresses are already in caps so the É will stay É even after applying strtolower .

But then I'll have the problem of having É inside ex : XXXÉXXÉ

Answer 1

I have the same problem in spanish, and I create this function

function capitalize($string)
{
    if (mb_detect_encoding($string) === 'UTF-8') {
        $string = mb_convert_case(utf8_encode($string), MB_CASE_TITLE, 'UTF-8');
    } else {
        $string = mb_convert_case($string, MB_CASE_TITLE, 'UTF-8');
    }
    return $string;
}

Answer 2

Try mb_* string functions for multibyte characters.

echo mb_convert_case(mb_strtolower($str), MB_CASE_TITLE, "UTF-8");