Capitalize functionality

Lynn asked in our old forum “The Capitalize function just capitalizes the first letter of the first word in a string. Because some names and cities can be two words, I’m looking for a function that capitalizes all the words in a string, so ‘Los Angeles’ rather than ‘Los angeles’ or ‘Peggy Sue’ rather than ‘Peggy sue’. Has anyone done that on their interface?”

I was messing around with this yesterday and used the gmatch to run through a string and capitalize. However, i also added it so that it could handle ‘Mc’s and Mac’s as well. try creating a shared module and use this.
–Begin capitalize function —————————————————
–Table that can be altered for names that need unique capitalization
local C = {
‘mc’,
‘mac’
}

function string.allCaps(A)
local final = ”
for w in A:gmatch(‘%w+’) do
–check if it is a mc or mac etc
B, altered = ck(w)
–if not a mc or mac then standard caps
if altered ~= true then
B = normalCaps(w)
end
–build full string to return
final = final..’ ‘..B
end
return final
end

function normalCaps(A)
–if it does not match any in the tables return capital
return A:sub(1,1):upper()..A:sub(2):lower()
end

function ck(A)
–if it matches a name in C table then adjust
for k,v in pairs© do
if A:lower():sub(1, v:len()) == v then
A = A:sub(1,1):upper()..
A:sub(2,2+v:len()-2):lower()..
A:sub(v:len()+1,v:len()+1 ):upper()..
A:sub(v:len()+2):lower()
return A, true
end
end
return _, false
end
–END capitalize function —————————————————

Then you can just call it from your script and send it a string like so;
local String = “mcdonalds 7702 macknight Road, Pittsburgh, PA”
local Final = String:allCaps()

it may still need a little tweaking but it is a good start I think

Garry Christensen: G’day Lynn,
I like a challenge so here’s what I came up with (although I did steal Jeffery’s idea about Mc and Mac but added a little more)

print (string.proper(“mr charles harrington-o’tool, day/night manager, mcdonalds restaurant, 7702 macknight road, pittsburgh, PA”, true ))

–> Mr Charles Harrington-O’Tool, Day/Night Manager, McDonalds Restaurant, 7702 MacKnight Road, Pittsburgh, PA

function string:proper(bPreserveUpper)
local tPattern = {‘ Ma?c%a’, ‘%a+%-%a’, “[ %-]O’%a”, ‘%a+/%a’}

— add a space to beginning for reasons that will become obvious
local sResult = ‘ ‘ .. self

if not bPreserveUpper then
— start with everything in lower case
sResult = sResult:lower()
end

— capitalise the first letter following a space
sResult = sResult:gsub(‘ %a’, function (s)
return s:upper()
end)

— now loop through the patterns and capitalise the last letter in the pattern
for nCntr = 1, #tPattern do
sResult = sResult:gsub(tPattern[nCntr], function (s)
return s:sub(1, -2) .. s:sub(-1):upper()
end)
end

— return all except the added first space
return sResult:sub(2)
end