1425

How can I convert a JavaScript string value to be in all lowercase letters?

Example: "Your Name" to "your name"

1
  • does a question like this really deserve to earn the OP 14,000 rep? That's around 130 rep per character typed (yet with no apparent attempt to solve on his own... or to Google the solution) and continues to earn the OP a title of "Top 2% on the site" ... even though he hasn't even logged in, for over 5 years! Commented Dec 16, 2022 at 1:06

16 Answers 16

1830
const lowerCaseName = "Your Name".toLowerCase(); // your name
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4 Comments

Consider this also, "toLowerCase does not affect the value of the string str itself". This is base on a documentation here developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/…
what is time and space complexity of toLowerCase() function?
@RamzanChasygov It is both O(n) and faster than reimplementing it in JavaScript, unless you have a JavaScript engine programmed by very intelligent idiots.
A safer way to invoke toLowerCase() on variables would be (varName || '').toLowerCase();
436

Use either toLowerCase or toLocaleLowerCase methods of the String object. The difference is that toLocaleLowerCase will take current locale of the user/host into account. As per § 15.5.4.17 of the ECMAScript Language Specification (ECMA-262), toLocaleLowerCase

…works exactly the same as toLowerCase except that its result is intended to yield the correct result for the host environment’s current locale, rather than a locale-independent result. There will only be a difference in the few cases (such as Turkish) where the rules for that language conflict with the regular Unicode case mappings.

Example:

var lower = 'Your Name'.toLowerCase();

Also note that the toLowerCase and toLocaleLowerCase functions are implemented to work generically on any value type. Therefore you can invoke these functions even on non-String objects. Doing so will imply automatic conversion to a string value prior to changing the case of each character in the resulting string value. For example, you can apply toLowerCase directly on a date like this:

var lower = String.prototype.toLowerCase.apply(new Date());

and which is effectively equivalent to:

var lower = new Date().toString().toLowerCase();

The second form is generally preferred for its simplicity and readability. On earlier versions of IE, the first had the benefit that it could work with a null value. The result of applying toLowerCase or toLocaleLowerCase on null would yield null (and not an error condition).

2 Comments

The part about String.prototype.toLowerCase.apply(null) returning null doesn't appear to be correct. It throws a TypeError exception when I try it.
@JohnnyHK You're right. That bit used to hold true on earlier versions of IE where it was tested at the time the answer was originally posted. I've updated the answer to reflect your feedback. Thanks.
32

Yes, any string in JavaScript has a toLowerCase() method that will return a new string that is the old string in all lowercase. The old string will remain unchanged.

So, you can do something like:

"Foo".toLowerCase();
document.getElementById('myField').value.toLowerCase();

Comments

21

toLocaleUpperCase() or lower case functions don't behave like they should do. For example, on my system, with Safari 4, Chrome 4 Beta, and Firefox 3.5.x, it converts strings with Turkish characters incorrectly. The browsers respond to navigator.language as "en-US", "tr", "en-US" respectively.

But there isn't any way to get user's Accept-Lang setting in the browser as far as I could find.

Only Chrome gives me trouble although I have configured every browser as tr-TR locale preferred. I think these settings only affect the HTTP header, but we can't access to these settings via JavaScript.

In the Mozilla documentation it says "The characters within a string are converted to ... while respecting the current locale. For most languages, this will return the same as ...". I think it's valid for Turkish, and it doesn't differ if it's configured as en or tr.

In Turkish it should convert "DİNÇ" to "dinç" and "DINÇ" to "dınç" or vice-versa.

3 Comments

Accept-Language and navigator.language are two completely separate settings. Accept-Language reflects the user's chosen preferences for what languages they want to receive in web pages (and this setting is unfortuately inaccessible to JS). navigator.language merely reflects which localisation of the web browser was installed, and should generally not be used for anything. Both of these values are unrelated to the system locale, which is the bit that decides what toLocaleLowerCase() will do; that's an OS-level setting out of scope of the browser's prefs.
I thought Accept-Language and navigator.language should be somehow related. You can configure the default language in order via browsers' settings screens, but so you can't configure what navigator.language should respond. I think there should be another form of the function toLowerCase() which gets a locale parameter.
Yeah, there should really. Unfortunately locale-related features in JavaScript are weak, poorly-specified and generally unreliable.
17

Just an example for toLowerCase(), toUpperCase() and a prototype for the not yet available toTitleCase() or toProperCase():

String.prototype.toTitleCase = function() {
  return this.split(' ').map(i => i[0].toUpperCase() + i.substring(1).toLowerCase()).join(' ');
}

String.prototype.toPropperCase = function() {
  return this.toTitleCase();
}

var OriginalCase = 'Your Name';
var lowercase = OriginalCase.toLowerCase();
var upperCase = lowercase.toUpperCase();
var titleCase = upperCase.toTitleCase();

console.log('Original: ' + OriginalCase);
console.log('toLowerCase(): ' + lowercase);
console.log('toUpperCase(): ' + upperCase);
console.log('toTitleCase(): ' + titleCase);

2 Comments

-1 this code is very prone to errors with everything non-ASCII. For example, with the German input "die straße", you will get "Die Strasse" as the title case. Correct would be "Die Straße". Apart from that, prototype pollution is nowadays frowned upon.
@ComFreek It could've been faulty back then, but as for now, it works fairly well with node V17 and chrome V104
13

I paid attention that lots of people are looking for strtolower() in JavaScript. They are expecting the same function name as in other languages, and that's why this post is here.

I would recommend using a native JavaScript function:

"SomE StriNg".toLowerCase()

Here's the function that behaves exactly the same as PHP's one (for those who are porting PHP code into JavaScript)

function strToLower (str) {
    return String(str).toLowerCase();
}

Comments

9

Methods or functions: toLowerCase() and toUpperCase()

Description: These methods are used to cover a string or alphabet from lowercase to uppercase or vice versa. E.g., "and" to "AND".

Converting to uppercase:

Example code:

<script language=javascript>
    var ss = " testing case conversion method ";
    var result = ss.toUpperCase();
    document.write(result);
</script>

Result: TESTING CASE CONVERSION METHOD

Converting to lowercase:

Example Code:

<script language=javascript>
    var ss = " TESTING LOWERCASE CONVERT FUNCTION ";
    var result = ss.toLowerCase();
    document.write(result);
</script>

Result: testing lowercase convert function

Explanation: In the above examples,

  • toUpperCase() method converts any string to "UPPER" case letters.

  • toLowerCase() method converts any string to "lower" case letters.

Comments

8

Note that the function will only work on string objects.

For instance, I was consuming a plugin, and was confused why I was getting a "extension.tolowercase is not a function" JavaScript error.

 onChange: function(file, extension)
    {
      alert("extension.toLowerCase()=>" + extension.toLowerCase() + "<=");

Which produced the error "extension.toLowerCase is not a function". So I tried this piece of code, which revealed the problem!

alert("(typeof extension)=>" + (typeof extension) + "<=");;

The output was "(typeof extension)=>object<=" - so aha, I was not getting a string var for my input. The fix is straightforward though - just force the darn thing into a String!:

var extension = String(extension);

After the cast, the extension.toLowerCase() function worked fine.

Comments

4

Option 1: Using toLowerCase()

var x = 'ABC';
x = x.toLowerCase();

Option 2: Using your own function

function convertToLowerCase(str) {
  var result = '';

  for (var i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {
    var code = str.charCodeAt(i);
    if (code > 64 && code < 91) {
      result += String.fromCharCode(code + 32);
    } else {
      result += str.charAt(i);
    }
  }
  return result;
}

Call it as:

x = convertToLowerCase(x);

1 Comment

The first option has already been mentioned in other answers, the second option fails badly for everything non-ASCII.
3

Simply use JS toLowerCase()
let v = "Your Name" let u = v.toLowerCase(); or
let u = "Your Name".toLowerCase();

Comments

1

Simply you can use built-in methods of javascript like toLowerCase()

let str=Hello World;
let lowercasestr=str.toLowerCase()
console.log("lowercasestr")

Comments

0
const str = 'Your Name';

// convert string to lowercase
const lowerStr = str.toLowerCase();

// print the new string
console.log(lowerStr);

Comments

-2

In case you want to build it yourself:

function toLowerCase(string) {

    let lowerCaseString = "";

    for (let i = 0; i < string.length; i++) {
        // Find ASCII charcode
        let charcode = string.charCodeAt(i);

        // If uppercase
        if (charcode > 64 && charcode < 97) {
            // Convert to lowercase
            charcode = charcode + 32
        }

        // Back to char
        let lowercase = String.fromCharCode(charcode);

        // Append
        lowerCaseString = lowerCaseString.concat(lowercase);
    }

    return lowerCaseString
}

Comments

-2

You can use the in built .toLowerCase() method on JavaScript strings. Example:

var x = "Hello";
x.toLowerCase();

1 Comment

This is identical to the accepted answer minus good code formatting
-3

Try this short way:

var lower = (str+"").toLowerCase();

1 Comment

Please explain your answer. For instance, why is + "" necessary? How is it different from previous answers? Please respond by editing (changing) your answer, not here in comments (*********** without *********** "Edit:", "Update:", or similar - the answer should appear as if it was written today).
-4

Try

<input type="text" style="text-transform: uppercase">  <!-- uppercase -->
<input type="text" style="text-transform: lowercase">  <!-- lowercase -->

Demo - JSFiddle

2 Comments

Nice, but not especially javascriptish, no?
Building on what @some-non-descript-user said, the OP is looking for a JavaScript solution. Though this answer is valid, it does not answer the OP's question as per the defined parameters.

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