If you’re anything like me, you’re a little lazy when it comes to title casing text in WordPress but as we all know, it’s really important to be consistent across your web pages, so what’s the answer? As I often comment … it’s time for technology to come to the rescue.

Using a simple code snippet I came across on Camen Design, you can easily add a small function to your website, which in turn will automatically convert all your headers to a consistent format.

Start by inserting the following code in your header.php file:

function titleCase ($s_title) {
	//remove HTML, storing it for later
	//         html elements to ignore  | tags  | entities
	$regex = '/<(code|var)[^>]*>.*?</1>|<[^>]+>|&[^w]+;/';
	preg_match_all ($regex, $s_title, $html, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
	$result = preg_replace ($regex, '', $s_title);

	//break by punctuation, find the start of words
	preg_match_all ('/[w&`'‘’"“.@:/{([<>_]+-? */', $result, $matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
	foreach ($matches[0] as &$m) {
		//find words that should be lowercase
		if ($m[1]>0 && mb_substr ($result, $m[1]-2, 1) !== ':' && preg_match (
			'/^(a(nd?|s|t)?|b(ut|y)|en|for|i[fn]|o[fnr]|t(he|o)|vs?.?|via)[ -]/i', $m[0]
		)) {
			$m[0] = mb_strtolower ($m[0]);

		//brackets and other wrappers
		} elseif (preg_match ('/['"_{([]/', mb_substr ($result, $m[1], 3))) {
			$m[0] = mb_substr ($m[0], 0, 1).mb_strtoupper (mb_substr ($m[0], 1, 1)).
				mb_substr ($m[0], 2)
			;

		//both of these cases are no change, thus if not matched fall back to capitalisation
		} elseif (!(
			preg_match ('/[A-Z]+|&|[w]+[._][w]+/', mb_substr ($m[0], 1)) ||
			preg_match ('/[])}]/', mb_substr ($result, $m[1]-1, 3))
		)) {
			$m[0] = mb_strtoupper (mb_substr ($m[0], 0, 1)).mb_substr ($m[0], 1);
		}
		//substitute the change into the title
		$result = substr_replace ($result, $m[0], $m[1], strlen ($m[0]));
	}
	//restore the HTML
	foreach ($html[0] as $tag) $result = substr_replace ($result, $tag[0], $tag[1], 0);
	return $result;
}

Next, you’ll need to do a search and replace your entire WordPress theme directory for the current title tag (<?php the_title(); ?>) and replace it with the new tag (<?php echo titleCase(the_title(”,”,FALSE)); ?>). As always, be sure to backup your code before doing this. What the new code has done is told WordPress to insert the title as variable instead of displaying it. Once stored in memory, the titleCase function is called and does it’s job of standardizing the text.

I found a few other really good resources for title casing in PHP in SitePoint and WeberDev but the PHP resource for UC words was one of the best, albeit a little technical, with a little bit of PHP knowledge you should be able to modify the code to work with most CMS applications. Make sure to read about speeding up WordPress however, as this function will certainly add to the server load of a popular website.