tolower

 

C

Language

headers

Type support

Dynamic memory management

Error handling

Program utilities

Variadic function support

Date and time utilities

Strings library

Algorithms

Numerics

Input/output support

Localization support

Thread support (C11)

Atomic operations (C11)

Technical Specifications

 

Strings library

Byte strings

Multibyte strings

Wide strings

 

Null-terminated byte strings

Functions
Character manipulation
isalnum isalpha islower isupper isdigit isxdigit isblank (C99)	iscntrl isgraph isspace isprint ispunct tolower toupper
Conversions to numeric formats
atof atoiatolatoll strtolstrtoll	strtoulstrtoull strtofstrtodstrtold strtoimaxstrtoumax (C99)(C99)
String manipulation
strcpystrcpy_s (C11)
strncpystrncpy_s (C11)
strcatstrcat_s (C11)
strncatstrncat_s (C11)
strxfrm
String examination
strlenstrnlen_s (C11) strcmp strncmp strcoll strchr strrchr	strspn strcspn strpbrk strstr strtokstrtok_s (C11)
Memory manipulation
memchr
memcmp
memsetmemset_s (C11)
memcpymemcpy_s (C11)
memmovememmove_s (C11)
Miscellaneous
strerrorstrerror_sstrerrorlen_s (C11)(C11)

 

Defined in header <ctype.h>
int tolower( int ch );

Converts the given character to lowercase according to the character conversion rules defined by the currently installed C locale.

In the default "C" locale, the following uppercase letters ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ are replaced with respective lowercase letters abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.

Parameters

ch

-

character to be converted. If the value of ch is not representable as unsigned char and does not equal EOF, the behavior is undefined.

Return value

Lowercase version of ch or unmodified ch if no lowercase version is listed in the current C locale.

Example

Run this code

#include <stdio.h>
#include <ctype.h>
#include <locale.h>
#include <limits.h>
 
int main(void)
{
    /* In the default locale: */
    unsigned char l;
    for (unsigned char u=0; u<UCHAR_MAX; u++) {
        l = tolower(u);
        if (l!=u) printf("%c%c ", u,l);
    }
    printf("\n\n");
 
    unsigned char c = '\xb4'; // the character Ž in ISO-8859-15
                              // but ´ (acute accent) in ISO-8859-1 
    unsigned char c2 = c;   // for printing
    setlocale(LC_ALL, "en_US.iso88591");
    printf("in iso8859-1, tolower('0x%x') gives 0x%x\n", c2, tolower(c));
    setlocale(LC_ALL, "en_US.iso885915");
    printf("in iso8859-15, tolower('0x%x') gives 0x%x\n", c2, tolower(c));
}

Output:

Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
 
in iso8859-1, tolower('0xb4') gives 0xb4
in iso8859-15, tolower('0xb4') gives 0xb8

References

• C11 standard (ISO/IEC 9899:2011):

• 7.4.2.1 The tolower function (p: 203)

• C99 standard (ISO/IEC 9899:1999):

• 7.4.2.1 The tolower function (p: 184)

• C89/C90 standard (ISO/IEC 9899:1990):

• 4.3.2.1 The tolower function

See also

toupper	converts a character to uppercase (function)
towlower (C95)	converts a wide character to lowercase (function)
C++ documentation for tolower