How do I modify an attribute across all rows in a table?

Question

My apologies for asking such a novice question but, I need help building a script using either PHP or directly in MySQL that can do the following:

1. Take the values of a column in a table (text)
2. Change them into capitalized words (from "this is a title" to "This Is A Title")
3. Replace the old values (uncapitalized) with the new values (capitalized).

Answer 1

1. MySQL doesn't have a function like Oracle's initcap - you have to create the function yourself :

    DELIMITER $$ DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `test`.`initcap`$$ CREATE FUNCTION `initcap`(x char(30)) RETURNS char(30) CHARSET utf8 BEGIN SET @str=''; SET @l_str=''; WHILE x REGEXP ' ' DO SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(x, ' ', 1) INTO @l_str; SELECT SUBSTRING(x, LOCATE(' ', x)+1) INTO x; SELECT CONCAT(@str, ' ', CONCAT(UPPER(SUBSTRING(@l_str,1,1)),LOWER(SUBSTRING(@l_str,2)))) INTO @str; END WHILE; RETURN LTRIM(CONCAT(@str, ' ', CONCAT(UPPER(SUBSTRING(x,1,1)),LOWER(SUBSTRING(x,2))))); END$$ DELIMITER ; 

   Mind that the text length on the parameter is as long as your longest text field.

2. Use an UPDATE statement :

    UPDATE TABLE SET text_column = initcap(text_column) 

Answer 2

This is not a function that is native to MySQL, so using PHP's ucwords might save us some time.

Note: This will run a single UPDATE query for each row in your table.

<?php

  $r = mysql_query("SELECT id, name FROM users");
  while($u = mysql_fetch_object($r)){
    $r2 = mysql_query("UPDATE users SET name=".ucwords($u->name)." WHERE id={$u=>id}");
  }

?>

Answer 3

Select your rows with SQL along the lines of:

SELECT <string> FROM <table> [WHERE <field> = <whatever>]

Update the string using PHP's ucwords() function:

$UpperCaseString = ucwords($lowercase);

Update each record:

UPDATE <table> SET <fieldname> = <UpperCaseString> WHERE id=<id>

Answer 4

What you'll want to do is fetch all the values, and for each one, run the PHP function ucwords on it. Code sample coming shortly...

EDIT: @smotchkkiss beat me to it -- use his code :-)