Normalize Name-Surname strings: PHP+REGEX (Spanish chars- UTF8) - php

Question

I'm having strings with name and surname which I need to normalize with a functiont and make them like:
Name Surname (I can recive strings like NAME SURNAME, Name SURNAME, etc...)
I've found this snipet:
echo nameize("HÉCTOR MAÑAÇ");
function nameize($str,$a_char = array("'","-"," ")){
//$str contains the complete raw name string
//$a_char is an array containing the characters we use as separators for capitalization. If you don't pass anything, there are three in there as default.
$string = strtolower($str);
foreach ($a_char as $temp){
$pos = strpos($string,$temp);
if ($pos){
//we are in the loop because we found one of the special characters in the array, so lets split it up into chunks and capitalize each one.
$mend = '';
$a_split = explode($temp,$string);
foreach ($a_split as $temp2){
//capitalize each portion of the string which was separated at a special character
$mend .= ucfirst($temp2).$temp;
}
$string = substr($mend,0,-1);
}
}
return ucfirst($string);
}
Which works pretty well, but, as you can see testing this exact example, doesn't parse spanish chars (utf8) I've tested mb_regex_encoding("UTF-8"); mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");, headers UTF8, etc. But can't make it work fine with "special" spanish chars.
Any suggestion?

Answer 1

Can't see, where you use the Multibyte String Functions.
Maybe this would be convenient for your needs:
echo mb_convert_case("HÉCTOR MAÑAÇ", MB_CASE_TITLE, "UTF-8");
output:
Héctor Mañaç

Answer 2

Your function works fine for the given example also. Please check your file encoding type. It must be UTF-8. You can check it in Notepadd++.