How to Capitalize Each Words' First Letter in PostgreSQL

Problem

In a PostgreSQL string, you need to make the first letter of each word uppercase and the rest of the letters lowercase.

Example

Our database has a table named student with data in two columns, id and full_name.

Let’s change the capitalization of students’ full names by converting this string so that only the first letters of the first and last names are capitalized – just as we’d normally write them.

Solution

We’ll use the INITCAP() function. Here’s the query you’d write:

SELECT 
  INITCAP (full_name) AS new_full_name
FROM student;

Here’s the result:

Discussion

In PostgreSQL, you can use the INITCAP() function to convert a string to a new string that capitalizes the first letter of every word. All other letters will be lowercase. This function takes one parameter as a string and changes the capitalization for each word as described.

In our example, the full name Anne Williams was originally stored in the column full_name as ANNE WILLIAMS; after converting, this full name is Anne Williams.