How can I capitalize the first letter of each word?

Question

I need a script in any language to capitalize the first letter of every word in a file.

Thanks for all the answers.

Stackoverflow rocks!

Answer 1

php uses ucwords($string) or ucwords('all of this will start with capitals') to do the trick. so you can just open up a file and get the data and then use this function:

<?php 
$file = "test.txt"; 
$data = fopen($file, 'r');
$allData = fread($data, filesize($file));
fclose($fh);
echo ucwords($allData);
?>

Edit, my code got cut off. Sorry.

Answer 2

This is done in PHP.

$string = "I need a script in any language to capitalize the first letter of every word in a file."
$cap = ucwords($string);

Answer 3

A simple perl script that does this: (via http://www.go4expert.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2138)

sub ucwords {
  $str = shift;
  $str = lc($str);
  $str =~ s/\b(\w)/\u$1/g;
  return $str;
}

while (<STDIN>) {
    print ucwords $_;
}

Then you call it with

perl ucfile.pl < srcfile.txt > outfile.txt

Answer 4

In Python, open('file.txt').read().title() should suffice.

Answer 5

In ruby:

str.gsub(/^[a-z]|\s+[a-z]/) { |a| a.upcase }

hrm, actually this is nicer:

str.each(' ') {|word| puts word.capitalize}

Answer 6

ruby:

irb> foo = ""; "foo bar".split.each { |x| foo += x.capitalize + " " }

=> ["foo", "bar"]

irb> foo

=> "Foo Bar "

Answer 7

perl:

$ perl -e '$foo = "foo bar"; $foo =~ s/\b(\w)/uc($1)/ge; print $foo;'

Foo Bar

Answer 8

From the shell, using ruby, this works assuming your input file is called FILENAME, and it should preserve all existing file formatting - it doesn't collapse the spacing as some other solutions might:

cat FILENAME | ruby -n -e 'puts $_.gsub(/^[a-z]|\s+[a-z]/) { |a| a.upcase }'

Answer 9

Scala:

scala> "hello world" split(" ") map(_.capitalize) mkString(" ")
res0: String = Hello World

or well, given that the input should be a file:

import scala.io.Source
Source.fromFile("filename").getLines.map(_ split(" ") map(_.capitalize) mkString(" "))

Answer 10

C#:

string foo = "bar baz";
foo = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ToTitleCase(foo);
//foo = Bar Baz

Answer 11

VB.Net:

Dim sr As System.IO.StreamReader = New System.IO.StreamReader("c:\lowercase.txt")
Dim str As String = sr.ReadToEnd()
sr.Close()
str = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ToTitleCase(str)
Dim sw As System.IO.StreamWriter = New System.IO.StreamWriter("c:\TitleCase.txt")
sw.Write(str)
sw.Close()

Answer 12

Here's another Ruby solution, using Ruby's nice little one-line scripting helpers (automatic reading of input files etc.)

ruby -ni~ -e "puts $_.gsub(/\b\w+\b/) { |word| word.capitalize }" foo.txt

(Assuming your text is stored in a file named foo.txt.)

Best used with Ruby 1.9 and its awesome multi-language support if your text contains non-ASCII characters.

Answer 13

Using the standard (Gnu) sed utility from the command line:

sed -i -r 's/\b(.)/\U\1/g' file.txt

Get rid of the "-i" if you don't want it to modify the file in-place.