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

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 2

Using the non-standard (Gnu extension) 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.

note that you should not use this in portable scripts

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

C#:

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

Answer 5

zsh solution

#!/bin/zsh
mystring="vb.net lOOKS very unsexy"
echo "${(C)mystring}"
Vb.Net Looks Very Unsexy

Note it does CAP after every non alpha character, see VB.Net .

Answer 6

In ruby:

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

hrm, actually this is nicer:

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