INITCAP

Syntax

Description of the illustration initcap.gif

Purpose

INITCAP returns char, with the first letter of each word in uppercase, all other letters in lowercase. Words are delimited by white space or characters that are not alphanumeric.

char can be of any of the datatypes CHAR, VARCHAR2, NCHAR, or NVARCHAR2. The return value is the same datatype as char. The database sets the case of the initial characters based on the binary mapping defined for the underlying character set. For linguistic-sensitive uppercase and lowercase, please refer to NLS_INITCAP.

This function does not support CLOB data directly. However, CLOBs can be passed in as arguments through implicit data conversion.

Examples

The following example capitalizes each word in the string:

SELECT INITCAP('the soap') "Capitals" FROM DUAL; 

Capitals
---------
The Soap