Question : Console utility for capitalising/initialising words in string - for bash script?

Hi,

I'm trying to do a translation to a text string in a bash script, to initialise each word in a string (so we're talking console standard input/output here).

I found the 'tr' utility and tried a few things including:

echo "Simon briggs" | tr ' a-z' ' A-Z'      *note the spaces*

produces "SIMON BRIGGS", when I really want "Simon Briggs"...

so it only appears to work on characters individually, when I want to check for a 'pair' of characters. This should hopefully explain what I mean at least.

Anyone have advice on a more suitable util - and perhaps some hints on the syntax required for it?


Cheers

Simon

Answer : Console utility for capitalising/initialising words in string - for bash script?

You probably want to use perl (specifically - "perl -e") ?  It's considerably more powerful, and understands all alphabets in all languages, instead of just English using ASCII


echo 'fred nerk' | perl -e 'undef $/;$a=<>; $a=~s/\b(.)/\u$1/sg; print $a';

What the above does is...


undef $/; # treats line breaks like spaces, instead of input terminators
$a=<>; # Gets the input
$a=~s/\b(.)/\u$1/sg; # Does the conversion*
print $a; # Outputs it

Here's the regular expression explanation:-


$a      # This has out input
=~     # Tells perl to convert it using the following regexp
s/       # Says we want to substiture stuff
\b(.)   # Matches any "word break" and grabs the next character
/        # End of the match separator
\u$1   # replaces what we matched with the uppercase version of it ($1 is the variable from the earlier matching brackets)
/sg;   # "s" means treat line breaks like spaces, "g" means do everything (not just the 1st)