Thread: Capitalizing First Letter of Every Word

My mistake, there _is_ a function already:

initcap(text) text Converts first letter of each word (whitespace
separated) to upper case. initcap('hello thomas') Hello Thomas

-Knight

On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Alex Knight wrote:

> Brian,
>
> My suggestion would be to create a query that gets all the values for that
> table and does something like the following:
>
> select  upper(substring('knight' from 1 for 1)) ||
>     lower(substring('knight') from 2));
>
> The problem with this, is it doesn't do anything except the first
> character.
>
> You could probably write something a bit more complex in a procedure or
> function.
>
> -Knight
>
> On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Brian T. Allen wrote:
>
> > Hi *,
> >
> > I have a database of products, and the client entered everything in all caps.  While there is no intelligent way to
dochange everything to what it should be, changing the first letter of every word to uppercase and everything else to
lowercasewould at least look better (except for the occasional acroynym). 
> >
> > Is there a function to do that? I think I can handle everything except breaking the whole column up into individual
words...  I know how I would do it in PHP (and I may have to resort to that), but would prefer to do it in the db. 
> >
> > Any suggestions?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Brian
> >
>
>

Brian,

My suggestion would be to create a query that gets all the values for that
table and does something like the following:

select  upper(substring('knight' from 1 for 1)) ||
    lower(substring('knight') from 2));

The problem with this, is it doesn't do anything except the first
character.

You could probably write something a bit more complex in a procedure or
function.

-Knight

On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Brian T. Allen wrote:

> Hi *,
>
> I have a database of products, and the client entered everything in all caps.  While there is no intelligent way to
dochange everything to what it should be, changing the first letter of every word to uppercase and everything else to
lowercasewould at least look better (except for the occasional acroynym). 
>
> Is there a function to do that? I think I can handle everything except breaking the whole column up into individual
words...  I know how I would do it in PHP (and I may have to resort to that), but would prefer to do it in the db. 
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks,
> Brian
>

On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Brian T. Allen wrote:

> Hi *,
>
> I have a database of products, and the client entered everything in all caps.  While there is no intelligent way to
dochange everything to what it should be, changing the first letter of every word to uppercase and everything else to
lowercasewould at least look better (except for the occasional acroynym). 
>
> Is there a function to do that? I think I can handle everything except breaking the whole column up into individual
words...  I know how I would do it in PHP (and I may have to resort to that), but would prefer to do it in the db. 
>
> Any suggestions?

try this:

UPDATE lala_table SET lala_col=initcap(lower(lala_col));

It will make the first letter of every word uppercase (close enough)

If not satisfied, you can do it by extracting the first character, capitalizing, and then lower()ing the rest of the
message.Check http://www.postgresql.org/idocs/index.php?functions-string.html for
char_length(),substring(),upper(),lower()

cheers,
thalis

>
> Thanks,
> Brian
>

----- Original Message -----

From: Brian T. Allen

To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org

Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2001 6:56 PM

Subject: Capitalizing First Letter of Every Word

Hi *,

 

I have a database of products, and the client entered everything in all caps.  While there is no intelligent way to do change everything to what it should be, changing the first letter of every word to uppercase and everything else to lowercase would at least look better (except for the occasional acroynym).

 

Is there a function to do that? I think I can handle everything except breaking the whole column up into individual words...   I know how I would do it in PHP (and I may have to resort to that), but would prefer to do it in the db.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Thanks,

Brian