One way to do this is the code below. It goes through the string finding a word boundary followed by a series of word-characters and another word boundary and replaces it with the lcfirst'ed version of the word.

Another way would be to match on \b\w and replace with the lowercased version of the letter. To me though this version seems more readable. The other version may well be more efficient, but I think that's a question for the benchmarkers.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $test = "This Is A [Big] [Nasty Old] [Test]";

$test =~ s/\b(\w+)\b/lcfirst $1/eg;
print $test;
[download]

Update: Okay, with the odd formatting I misread things as needing uppercasing.. fixed now though. If you're just trying to reduce everything to lowercase though just use 'lc $test'- It's quicker, easier, and does exactly what it says on the tin.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.