lcfirst and ucfirst not working

[laksh]

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[davido]

It's not entirely clear what you're trying to accomplish (or demonstrate) with that code snippet. It is using a variable that is never assigned a value ($little), and it never even uses the function ucfirst. ...and there's no function called 'lsfirst' (at least not as part of core Perl).

But I can assure you that the \L, \U, \l, and \u metacharacters do work, as do their function based cousins, lc, uc, lcfirst, and ucfirst:

my $string_upper = "BAR";
my $string_lower = "bar";

print "Testing metacharacter operations.\n";
print "\\L: [$string_upper] => [\L$string_upper]\n";
print "\\U: [$string_lower] => [\U$string_lower]\n";
print "\\l: [$string_upper] => [\l$string_upper]\n";
print "\\u: [$string_lower] => [\u$string_lower]\n";

print "\nTesting function operations.\n";
print "     lc($string_upper) => (" ,      lc $string_upper, ")\n";
print "     uc($string_lower) => (" ,      uc $string_lower, ")\n";
print "lcfirst($string_upper) => (" , lcfirst $string_upper, ")\n";
print "ucfirst($string_lower) => (" , ucfirst $string_lower, ")\n";

...produces...

Testing metacharacter operations.
\L: [BAR] => [bar]
\U: [bar] => [BAR]
\l: [BAR] => [bAR]
\u: [bar] => [Bar]

Testing function operations.
     lc(BAR) => (bar)
     uc(bar) => (BAR)
lcfirst(BAR) => (bAR)
ucfirst(bar) => (Bar)

[laksh]

I am trying to do as per below code but it is not working, here I dont want to use ucfirst

print "Please enter your name:\n";
chomp($name = <>);
$x = "\u substr($name,0,1)\n";
print $x;

But it giving the result Please enter your name: sds Substr(sds,0,1)

[davido]

As choroba correctly mentioned, function calls don't interpolate inside of strings (at least not unless you resort to some ugly trickery). The far better approach is this:

print "Please enter your name:\n";
chomp( $name = <> );
$x = ucfirst $name;
print $x;

If you have a good reason for not wanting to use ucfirst, then you do have alternatives:

# The \u metacharacter acts only upon the first character.
# No need for substr.
$x = "\u$name";

...or...

# Assuming Perl 5.14+
$x = $name =~ s/^(.)/\u$1/r;

...or...

$x = $name;
$x =~ s/^(.)/\u$1/;

But why isn't ucfirst available to you? Also, did you read through the code example I provided in my earlier Post? It should have made it reasonably clear that "\u$string" does what you want without resorting to using substr (unless we're not seeing some relevant code from you that would make this approach unsavory).

[choroba]

Function calls are not interpolated in double quotes.

[moritz]

What do you expect the code to print? You never assign anything to $little, so the last line prints an empty line. Just as I expected.