How do I lowercase a string in C?

to convert to lower case is equivalent to rise bit 0x60 if you restrict yourself to ASCII:

for(char *p = pstr; *p; ++p)
    *p = *p > 0x40 && *p < 0x5b ? *p | 0x60 : *p;

If you need Unicode support in the lower case function see this question: Light C Unicode Library

It's in the standard library, and that's the most straight forward way I can see to implement such a function. So yes, just loop through the string and convert each character to lowercase.

Something trivial like this:

#include <ctype.h>

for(int i = 0; str[i]; i++){
  str[i] = tolower(str[i]);
}

or if you prefer one liners, then you can use this one by J.F. Sebastian:

for ( ; *p; ++p) *p = tolower(*p);

Looping the pointer to gain better performance:

#include <ctype.h>

char* toLower(char* s) {
  for(char *p=s; *p; p++) *p=tolower(*p);
  return s;
}
char* toUpper(char* s) {
  for(char *p=s; *p; p++) *p=toupper(*p);
  return s;
}