Ruby equivalent of PHP's ucfirst() function

Question

What's the best way in Ruby (with Rails, if relevant) to capitalize the first letter of a string?

Note that String#capitalize is not what I want since, in addition to capitalizing the first letter of the string, this function makes all other characters lowercase (which I don't want -- I'd like to leave them untouched):

>> "a A".capitalize
=> "A a"

Answer 1

Have a look at this.

capitalizing-first-letter-of-each-word

There's not an inbuilt function. You need to split the letters and rejoin or try Rails' String#titleize and see if it does what you want.

Answer 2

You can use "sub" to get what you want (note: I haven't tested this with multibyte strings)

"a A".sub(/^(\w)/) {|s| s.capitalize}

(and you can of course monkeypatch String to add this as a method if you like)

Answer 3

what about styling that via CSS and voila - no scripting needed!

p:first-letter (font-size: 16px;}

ps: i assume you want to print that later on screen and not to save it in DB or such use - in that case, you can ignore this answer.

Answer 4

In Rails you have the String#titleize method:

"testing string titleize method".titleize #=> "Testing String Titleize Method"

Answer 5

Upper case the first char, and save it back into the string

s = "a A"
s[0] = s[0,1].upcase
p s # => "A A"

Or,

class String
  def ucfirst!
    self[0] = self[0,1].upcase
    self
  end
end

Answer 6

If you don't want to modify the original string, you can do it this way:

class String
  def ucfirst
    str = self.clone
    str[0] = str[0,1].upcase
    str
  end
end