ucwords

The ucwords() function turns the first character of each word in a string to upper-case, if the first character is alphabetic.

PHP

echo ucwords("ruby is easy.");
=> // Ruby Is Easy.

Ruby doesn’t have a function which can capitalize all the words in a string - so to accomplish this it’s a little bit harder. You need to split the string into words, then capitalize the first character of each word, and then finally join all the words back into a string.

Ruby

puts "ruby is easy.".split(' ').select {|w| w.capitalize! || w }.join(' ');
=> # Ruby Is Easy.

lcfirst

The lcfirst() function returns a string, with the first character in lower case - only if the first character is alphabetic.

PHP

echo lcfirst("Java is OK.");
=> // java is OK.

Ruby

my_string = "Java is OK.";
 
puts my_string[0,1].downcase + my_string[1..-1];
=> # java is OK.

ucfirst

The ucfirst function returns a string, with the first character capitalized - only if the first character is alphabetic.

PHP

echo ucfirst("ruby is great!");
=> // Ruby is great!

Ruby

puts "ruby is great!".capitalize
=> # Ruby is great!