Upcase, downcase. The upcase() and downcase() methods affect letters. Upcase changes lowercase letters to uppercase. And downcase changes uppercase letters to lowercase.
Notes, assignment. You must assign to the result of upcase() and downcase(). The original string instance is not modified—a modified copy of the string is made.
First example. We begin by calling the upcase method, and then invoking the downcase method on the result. When we call these methods, only letters are affected.
Info Numbers and spaces are not affected or removed by upcase and downcase—they are left alone in the string.
# An input string.
value = "BLUE bird"# Change cases.
upper = value.upcase()
lower = value.downcase()
# Display results.
puts upper
puts lowerBLUE BIRD
blue bird
In-place. Suppose we want to modify a string in-place, without having to assign the result of upcase or downcase. We can use an exclamation mark to modify the current string variable.
test = "bird"# Use exclamation mark to modify the string in-place.
test.upcase!
puts testBIRD
A summary. In Ruby, we sometimes have logic that preprocesses files containing data that may have inconsistent cases. Often we want to lowercase (or uppercase) every string we encounter.
Dot Net Perls is a collection of pages with code examples, which are updated to stay current. Programming is an art, and it can be learned from examples.
Donate to this site to help offset the costs of running the server. Sites like this will cease to exist if there is no financial support for them.
Sam Allen is passionate about computer languages, and he maintains 100% of the material available on this website. He hopes it makes the world a nicer place.
This page was last updated on Jun 4, 2021 (image).