How to convert PascalCase to pascal_case?

Question

If I had:

$string = \"PascalCase\";

I need

\"pascal_case\"

Does PHP offer a function for this purpose?

Answer 1

The direct port from rails (minus their special handling for :: or acronyms) would be

function underscore($word){
    $word = preg_replace('#([A-Z\d]+)([A-Z][a-z])#','\1_\2', $word);
    $word = preg_replace('#([a-z\d])([A-Z])#', '\1_\2', $word);
    return strtolower(strtr($word, '-', '_'));
}

Knowing PHP, this will be faster than the manual parsing that's happening in other answers given here. The disadvantage is that you don't get to chose what to use as a separator between words, but that wasn't part of the question.

Also check the relevant rails source code

Note that this is intended for use with ASCII identifiers. If you need to do this with characters outside of the ASCII range, use the '/u' modifier for preg_matchand use mb_strtolower.