First letter to upper case

Question

Is there a other version to make the first letter of each string capital and also with FALSE for flac perl?

name<-"hallo"
gsub("(^[[:alpha:]])", "\\U\\1", name, perl=TRUE)

Answer 1

You can try something like:

name<-"hallo"
paste(toupper(substr(name, 1, 1)), substr(name, 2, nchar(name)), sep="")

Or another way is to have a function like:

firstup <- function(x) {
  substr(x, 1, 1) <- toupper(substr(x, 1, 1))
  x
}

Examples:

firstup("abcd")
## [1] Abcd

firstup(c("hello", "world"))
## [1] "Hello" "World"

Answer 2

As pointed out in the comment, it is now possible to do: stringr::str_to_title("iwejofwe asdFf FFFF")

stringr uses stringi under the hood which takes care of complex internationalization, unicode, etc., you can do: stri_trans_totitle("kaCk, DSJAIDO, Sasdd.", opts_brkiter = stri_opts_brkiter(type = "sentence"))

There is a C or C++ library underneath stringi .

Answer 3

for the lazy typer:

  paste0(toupper(substr(name, 1, 1)), substr(name, 2, nchar(name)))

will do too.

Answer 4

In stringr , there's str_to_sentence() which does something similar. Not quite an answer to this question, but it solves the problem I had.

str_to_sentence(c("not today judas", "i love cats", "other Caps converteD to lower though"))
#> [1] "Not today judas"  "I love cats"  "Other caps converted to lower though"  

Answer 5

Often we want only the first letter upper case, rest of the string lower case. In such scenario, we need to convert the whole string to lower case first.

Inspired by @alko989 answer, the function will be:

firstup <- function(x) {
  x <- tolower(x)
  substr(x, 1, 1) <- toupper(substr(x, 1, 1))
  x
}

Examples:

firstup("ABCD")
## [1] Abcd

Another option is to use str_to_title in stringr package

dog <- "The quick brown dog"    
str_to_title(dog)
## [1] "The Quick Brown Dog"

Answer 6

I like the "tidyverse" way using stringr with a oneliner

library(stringr)
input <- c("this", "is", "a", "test")
str_replace(input, "^\\w{1}", toupper)

Resulting in:

[1] "This" "Is"   "A"    "Test"

Answer 7

I was also looking for the answer on this, but the replies did not consider the case of strings starting with numbers or symbols. Also, the question was: "make the first letter of each string capital", not every word.

v = c("123.1 test test", "test", "test test", ". test")
stringr::str_replace(v, "([[:alpha:]])", toupper)
## [1] "123.1 Test test" "Test"            "Test test"       ". Test"