Re: Overcoming Initcap Function limitations? - Mailing list pgsql-sql

It's not clear exactly what you are trying to achieve, but you can use Postgres' built-in text searching system to exclude stopwords. For example:

CREATE FUNCTION initcap_realword(myword TEXT)

  returns TEXT language SQL AS 

$$

SELECT CASE WHEN length(to_tsvector(myword)) < 1

  THEN myword ELSE initcap(myword) END;

$$;

You could extend that to multi-word strings with a little effort. However, knowing that macdonald should be MacDonald requires a lot more intelligence than is provided by any Postgres built-in system or extension that I know of. What you are looking at is the field of science known as Natural Language Processing, which can get very complex very quickly. But for a Postgres answer, you might combine plpython3u with spacy (https://spacy.io/usage/spacy-101).

Cheers,

Greg