Strings can be in different formats such as lowercase, capitalized, and uppercase. In this article, I’ll show you how to convert a string to lowercase in Python.
A lowercase string has all its characters in small letters. An example is python.
A capitalized string has the first letter of each word capitalized, and the remaining letters are in small letters. An example is Python.
An uppercase string has all its characters in capital letters. PYTHON is an example.
Python has numerous string methods for modifying strings in different ways. To convert a string to lowercase, you can use the lower method.
The lower method of strings returns a new string from the old one with all characters in lowercase. Numbers, symbols, are all other non-alphabetical characters remain the same.
str.lower() Examples in Python
Here’s how to use the lower method in Python:
text = "HellO woRLd!" lower = text.lower() print(lower)
# hello world!
A good use case of the lower method is for comparing strings to evaluate their equality regardless of the case.
In Python, “Hello World” is not equal to “hello world” because equality is case-sensitive as you can see in the code below:
text1 = "Hello World"
text2 = "hello world" print(text1 == text2)
# False
text1 has an upper “H” and “W” whereas text2 has a lower “h” and “w”. Because the cases of these characters are different, text1 is not equal to text2 even though they have the same characters.
To compare both strings while ignoring their case, you can use the lower method like this:
text1 = "HeLLo worLD"
text2 = "HellO WORLd" print(text1 == text2)
# False print(text1.lower() == text2.lower())
# True
By converting both strings to lowercase, you can correctly check if they have the same characters.
How to Use upper in Python
The opposite of lowercase is uppercase, and Python also has a method for that as well. As you may have guessed, the upper method in Python returns a new string where all the characters are in uppercase.
You can use it similarly to the lower method like this:
text = "hello World!" upper = text.upper() print(upper)
// HELLO WORLD!
You can also use this method to check that two strings have the same set of characters. But in most applications today, developers use the lowercase comparison approach.
That’s it! Now you know how to convert a string to all lowercase or uppercase letters in Python.