How can I achieve initcap functionality in MySQL?

Question

I need the functionality of initcap for the region names. Is there any way to achieve this in MySQL?

• Africa
• India Sub Continent
• U.S. West Coast
• Europe / U.K

in this way the results can be?

Answer 1

Sometime back I was looking for a built-in initcap/ucfirst function in MySQL but unfortunately couldn't find such string functions so decided to write my own.. thanks to the MySQL community member who corrected the bug in my function & posted it back.

DELIMITER $$

DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `test`.`initcap`$$

CREATE FUNCTION `initcap`(x char(30)) RETURNS char(30) CHARSET utf8
READS SQL DATA
DETERMINISTIC
BEGIN
SET @str='';
SET @l_str='';
WHILE x REGEXP ' ' DO
SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(x, ' ', 1) INTO @l_str;
SELECT SUBSTRING(x, LOCATE(' ', x)+1) INTO x;
SELECT CONCAT(@str, ' ', CONCAT(UPPER(SUBSTRING(@l_str,1,1)),LOWER(SUBSTRING(@l_str,2)))) INTO @str;
END WHILE;
RETURN LTRIM(CONCAT(@str, ' ', CONCAT(UPPER(SUBSTRING(x,1,1)),LOWER(SUBSTRING(x,2)))));
END$$

DELIMITER ;


Usage: 

select initcap('This is test string');