Lower, uppercase

Characters are numbers—an uppercase "A" is a different number than a lowercase "a." But in the alphabet, these letters are the same.

With lowercased and uppercased, we change the casing of characters. More advanced Foundation methods like capitalizedString change just word-starting letters.

First example

Here we introduce a string containing the phrase "cat and dog." These are all lowercase letters and spaces. With uppercased() we change all letters to uppercase.

And Lowercased() changes the letters back to their original case. Each method call creates a string copy.

let phrase = "cat and dog"

// Get uppercase form of string.
let upper = phrase.uppercased()
print(upper)

// Get lowercase form.
let lower = upper.lowercased()
print(lower)CAT AND DOG
cat and dog

Capitalized

This method changes word-starting characters in a string. It uppercases letters after spaces and other punctuation chars.

Result We find the continent names are correctly capitalized. And chars after commas, pluses and dashes (hyphens) are also uppercased.

import Foundation

// Use capitalized to uppercase the first letters.
let phrase = "antarctica, asia, africa"
let upperFirst = phrase.capitalized
print(phrase)
print(upperFirst)

// Characters after punctuation are uppercased.
let test = "ab,cd+ef-gh"
let upperFirstTest = test.capitalized
print(test)
print(upperFirstTest)antarctica, asia, africa
Antarctica, Asia, Africa
ab,cd+ef-gh
Ab,Cd+Ef-Gh

`CaseInsensitiveCompare`

When comparing strings, uppercase and lowercase letters are not usually equal. But with caseInsensitiveCompare we can treat them as equal.

Info When we get a ComparisonResult.orderedSame, we know the two strings are equal except for casing.

import Foundation

// These strings have different cases.
let upper = "CAT"
let lower = "cat"

// Use caseInsensitiveCompare to compare the strings.
let result = upper.caseInsensitiveCompare(lower)

// If orderedSame the strings are equal except for case.
if result == ComparisonResult.orderedSame {
    print("Strings have same order")
}
Strings have same order

Memoization

It takes some CPU cycles to lowercase a string. A dictionary lookup is typically faster. We can store the result of lowercased() in a dictionary, and avoid repeat lookups.

Tip This is an example of memoization—the program caches a result, and avoids recomputing it.

Tip 2 If an operation is done many times, memoization can improve significantly a program's performance.

var cache = [String: String]()

func lowercasedCache(value: String) -> String {
    // Use the dictionary to avoid calling lowercased on a string 2 times.
    let result = cache[value]
    if result != nil {
        print("Cache used")
        return result!
    }
    // Store initial value in cache.
    let lower = value.lowercased()
    cache[value] = lower
    return lower
}

// Use our caching lowercase func.
var test = "VALUE"
print("Lower: " + lowercasedCache(value: test))
print("Lower: " + lowercasedCache(value: test))Lower: value
Cache used
Lower: value

Case is important: lowercase is not the same as uppercase. But sometimes we want (for display purposes) to capitalize or uppercase letters. And we can compare strings ignoring their cases.