What is ucfirst()?

ucfirst is a function which exists natively in PHP and other languages. It is used to capitalize the first character of a string. Unfortunately, it is not included in the JavaScript language by default.

That’s alright, because it is not that difficult to emulate!

Function: ucfirst

The ucfirst function will retrieve the character at position 0 in a string an apply the uppercase function to it. It will then apply a lowercase function and concatenate the remainder of the string to the uppercase first character.

With JavaScript, it is very simple as you can see below:

function ucfirst(string){ 
    return string.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + string.slice(1).toLowerCase(); 
}

Usage

// Create example string variable
var example_str = "this is an example string!";

// Lets view the output
console.log( ucfirst( example_str ) );

// Returns:
// This is an example string!