How to capitalize the first letter of word in a string using Java?

Question

Example strings

one thousand only
two hundred
twenty
seven

How do I change the first character of a string in capital letter and not change

Answer 1

Example using StringTokenizer class :

String st = "  hello all students";
String st1;
char f;
String fs="";
StringTokenizer a= new StringTokenizer(st);
while(a.hasMoreTokens()){   
        st1=a.nextToken();
        f=Character.toUpperCase(st1.charAt(0));
        fs+=f+ st1.substring(1);
        System.out.println(fs);
} 

Answer 2

if you only want to capitalize the first letter then the below code can be used

String output = input.substring(0, 1).toUpperCase() + input.substring(1);

Answer 3

Actually, you will get the best performance if you avoid + operator and use concat() in this case. It is the best option for merging just 2 strings (not so good for many strings though). In that case the code would look like this:

String output = input.substring(0, 1).toUpperCase().concat(input.substring(1));

Answer 4

1. Using String's substring() Method

public static String capitalize(String str) {
    if(str== null || str.isEmpty()) {
        return str;
    }

    return str.substring(0, 1).toUpperCase() + str.substring(1);
}

Now just call the capitalize() method to convert the first letter of a string to uppercase:

System.out.println(capitalize("stackoverflow")); // Stackoverflow
System.out.println(capitalize("heLLo")); // HeLLo
System.out.println(capitalize(null)); // null

2. Apache Commons Lang

The StringUtils class from Commons Lang provides the capitalize() method that can also be used for this purpose:

System.out.println(StringUtils.capitalize("apache commons")); // Apache commons
System.out.println(StringUtils.capitalize("heLLO")); // HeLLO
System.out.println(StringUtils.uncapitalize(null)); // null

Add the following dependency to your pom.xml file (for Maven only):

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-lang3</artifactId>
    <version>3.9</version>
</dependency>

Here is an article that explains these two approaches in detail.

Answer 5

If you only want to capitalize the first letter of a string named input and leave the rest alone:

String output = input.substring(0, 1).toUpperCase() + input.substring(1);

Now output will have what you want. Check that your input is at least one character long before using this, otherwise you'll get an exception.

Answer 6

String s=t.getText().trim();
int l=s.length();
char c=Character.toUpperCase(s.charAt(0));
s=c+s.substring(1);
for(int i=1; i<l; i++)
    {
        if(s.charAt(i)==' ')
        {
            c=Character.toUpperCase(s.charAt(i+1));
            s=s.substring(0, i) + c + s.substring(i+2);
        }
    }
    t.setText(s);