Why does Rails titlecase add a space to a name?

Question

Why does the titlecase mess up the name? I have:

John Mark McMillan

and it turns it into:

>> \"john mark McM         


        

Answer 1

You may also encounter names with two capital letters, such as McLaren, McDonald etc.

Have not spent time trying to improve it, but you could always do

Code

# Rails.root/config/initializers/string.rb
class String
  def titleize_name
    self.split(" ")
      .collect{|word| word[0] = word[0].upcase; word}
      .join(" ").gsub(/\b('?[a-z])/) { $1.capitalize }
  end
end

Examples

[2] pry(main)> "test name".titleize_name
=> "Test Name"
[3] pry(main)> "test name-name".titleize_name
=> "Test Name-Name"
[4] pry(main)> "test McName-name".titleize_name
=> "Test McName-Name"

Answer 2

Edited (inspired by The Tin Man's suggestion)

A hack will be:

class String
  def titlecase
    gsub(/(?:_|\b)(.)/){$1.upcase}
  end
end

p "john mark McMillan".titlecase
# => "John Mark McMillan"

Note that the string 'john mark McMillan' is inconsistent in capitalization, and is somewhat unexpected as a human input, or if it is not from a human input, you probably should not have the strings stored in that way. A string like 'john mark mc_millan' is more consistent, and would more likely appear as a human input if you define such convention. My answer will handle these cases as well:

p "john mark mc_millan".titlecase
# => "John Mark McMillan"

Answer 3

The documentation for titlecase says ([emphasis added]):

Capitalizes all the words and replaces some characters in the string to create a nicer looking title. titleize is meant for creating pretty output. It is not used in the Rails internals.

I'm only guessing here, but perhaps it regards PascalCase as a problem - maybe it thinks it's the name of a ActiveRecordModelClass.

Answer 4

Hmm, that's odd.. but you could write a quick custom regex to avoid using that method.

class String
    def custom_titlecase
        self.gsub(/\b\w/) { |w| w.upcase }
    end
end

"John Mark McMillan".custom_titlecase    # => "John Mark McMillan"

Source

Answer 5

We have just added this which supports a few different cases that we face.

class String
  # Default titlecase converts McKay to Mc Kay, which is not great
  # May even need to remove titlecase completely in the future to leave 
  # strings unchanged
  def self.custom_title_case(string = "")
    return "" if !string.is_a?(String) || string.empty?

    split = string.split(" ").collect do |word|
      word = word.titlecase

      # If we titlecase and it turns in to 2 words, then we need to merge back
      word = word.match?(/\w/) ? word.split(" ").join("") : word
      
      word
    end
    
    return split.join(" ")
  end
end

And the rspec test

# spec/lib/modules/string_spec.rb
require 'rails_helper'
require 'modules/string'

describe "String" do
  describe "self.custom_title_case" do
    it "returns empty string if incorrect params" do
      result_one = String.custom_title_case({ test: 'object' })
      result_two = String.custom_title_case([1, 2])
      result_three = String.custom_title_case()

      expect(result_one).to eq("")
      expect(result_two).to eq("")
      expect(result_three).to eq("")
    end

    it "returns string in title case" do
      result = String.custom_title_case("smiths hill")
      expect(result).to eq("Smiths Hill")
    end

    it "caters for 'Mc' i.e. 'john mark McMillan' edge cases" do
      result_one = String.custom_title_case("burger king McDonalds")
      result_two = String.custom_title_case("john mark McMillan")
      result_three = String.custom_title_case("McKay bay")

      expect(result_one).to eq("Burger King McDonalds")
      expect(result_two).to eq("John Mark McMillan")
      expect(result_three).to eq("McKay Bay")
    end

    it "correctly cases uppercase words" do
      result = String.custom_title_case("NORTH NARRABEEN")
      expect(result).to eq("North Narrabeen")
    end
  end
end

Answer 6

If all you want is to ensure that each word starts with a capital:

class String
  def titlecase2
    self.split(' ').map { |w| w[0] = w[0].upcase; w }.join(' ')
  end
end

irb(main):016:0> "john mark McMillan".titlecase2
=> "John Mark McMillan"