# mb_strtolower

(PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5)

mb_strtolower — Make a string lowercase

### Description

string mb_strtolower ( string `$str` [, string `$encoding` ] )

mb_strtolower() returns `str` with all alphabetic characters converted to lowercase.

`encoding` specifies the encoding of `str` ; if omitted, the internal character encoding value will be used.

For more information about the Unicode properties, please see » http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr21/.

By contrast to strtolower(), 'alphabetic' is determined by the Unicode character properties. Thus the behaviour of this function is not affected by locale settings and it can convert any characters that have 'alphabetic' property, such as A-umlaut (Ä).

Example#1 mb_strtolower() example

`<?php
$str = "Mary Had A Little Lamb and She LOVED It So";
$str = mb_strtolower($str);
echo $str; // Prints mary had a little lamb and she loved it so
?>`

See also strtolower(), mb_strtoupper() and mb_convert_case().