Studly Words in Laravel

Oct 25, 2017 laravel php

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In Laravel, the Support\Str class has a lot of useful methods for switching formats of strings between each other. I needed to take a hyphenated slug and change it to title case words. In Laravel land, I think this is referred to as “Studly” - because I found something very similar called Str::studly(). This converts underline or hyphenated words into a single string with capital letters. I wanted to not concatenate all of these.

To be clear, I wanted to convert something like something-is-here to Something Is Here - the closest I could find in Laravel made it SomethingIsHere which is not very good for a sentence.

So, following the Laravel namespace convention, I created my own Str class which augments the existing one to add this functionality:

app/Support/Str.php

<?php
/**
 * Our own string helper functions as well
 */
declare(strict_types=1);

namespace App\Support;

/**
 * Class Str
 * @package App\Support
 */
class Str extends \Illuminate\Support\Str
{
  /**
   * The cache of studly-cased word strings.
   *
   * @var array
   */
  protected static $studlyWordCache = [];

  /**
   * Convert snake case to studly words
   * 
   * ex: something_here to Something Here
   * 
   * @param $value
   * @return mixed|string
   */
  public static function studlyWords($value)
  {
    $key = $value;

    if (isset(static::$studlyWordCache[$key])) {
      return static::$studlyWordCache[$key];
    }
        
    return static::$studlyWordCache[$key] = ucwords(str_replace(['-', '_'], ' ', $value));
  }
}

To be clear, I might have chosen to do it slightly different, but in this case I decided to follow their paradigm. In the end, the only real difference between this method and the studly one in the base class is a lack of removing the final spaces after ucwords.