Alternating Case Generator

How to make alternating caps

1. Type or paste your text into Your text, press Open file to load a .txt file, or press Example to try the sample sentence.
2. Under Start with, choose lowercase (aLtErNaTiNg) or uppercase (AlTeRnAtInG). Lowercase is selected by default.
3. The Result box updates as you type. Press Copy to put it on the clipboard or Download .txt to save it as a file.
4. To work on the result further, press Use as input, or pick a tool under Continue with this text such as upside-down text. Undo brings back the previous input.

The two starting options

The only option decides the case of the very first letter. Every letter after that takes the opposite case of the one before it.

The case of your original text does not matter. “I LOVE MONDAYS”, “i love mondays” and “I Love Mondays” all give i LoVe MoNdAyS with lowercase first, because each letter is set to small or capital by its position, not changed relative to what it was. For the same reason, running the tool again on its own result gives the same text back, and switching the option simply swaps every letter.

How the pattern is applied

The generator walks through your text one character at a time and keeps a single switch for the whole text:

• Only letters with a capital and a small form count. Such a letter gets the current case and flips the switch. Spaces, tabs, line breaks, punctuation, apostrophes, digits, symbols and emoji are copied unchanged and do not flip it, and neither do letters from scripts without capitals, such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic or Hebrew: 日本語 abc with lowercase first gives 日本語 aBc.
• The pattern does not restart. It continues across words, sentences, lines and empty lines. In hElLo WoRlD the “W” is a capital because “o” before the space was small.
• Accented letters are letters. café crème becomes cAfÉ cRèMe; the accents stay on their letters. An accent typed as a separate combining mark rides along with its letter and does not use up a turn.
• Other alphabets work too. Greek, Cyrillic and other scripts with capital letters alternate the same way. Each letter is converted on its own, so a Greek word ending in Σ gets the middle form σ rather than the final form ς in a lowercase position.
• Letters never change length. A letter whose other case would be more than one character is left as it is but still takes its turn. The German ß would become “SS” as a capital, so in an uppercase position it stays ß: straße with uppercase first gives StRaße. The same applies to the ligature fi in an uppercase position and to the Turkish İ in a lowercase position.
• The result is the same in every browser. The conversion does not depend on your browser’s language, so a Turkish-language browser does not turn “i” into “İ”.

Worked examples

Line breaks are kept and the pattern carries over from one line to the next. With lowercase first:

Before:
Sure, that will definitely work.
Great idea!

After:
sUrE, tHaT wIlL dEfInItElY wOrK.
gReAt IdEa!

“work” ends with a capital K, so “Great” on the next line starts with a small g.

Alternating case vs inverse case

The two are easy to mix up, and the case converter offers both:

Use inverse case to fix text typed with Caps Lock on by mistake, where every letter is the wrong way round. Use alternating case when you want the zigzag look.

When people use it

• Mocking or sarcastic replies. Quoting someone back in alternating caps is the usual way to signal a sarcastic tone in chats, comments and meme captions.
• Meme captions and image text. Generate the caption here, copy it, and paste it into your image editor or meme maker so you do not have to press Shift on every other key.
• Playful usernames, titles and bios. Alternating caps uses normal letters, so it works anywhere plain text works, unlike the Unicode styles from the fancy text generator, which some apps and fonts cannot display.
• Test data. Developers paste mixed-case strings into forms and search boxes to check that comparisons ignore case.

Alternating caps is hard to read in long passages, so keep it to a phrase or a sentence. For headlines and normal writing, use the title case converter instead.

Questions