initialcaps

Convert a string to initial caps format (initial capitals on all words).

Description

INITIALCAPS Convert string to "initial caps" format (initial capitals on all words).

B = INITIALCAPS(A) converts the initial letter of all words in A to capitals, where A is a string. Only initial letters are affected.

B = INITIALCAPS(A,idx) converts only the words in A indexed by vector 'idx' to "initial caps" format. A "word" for these purposes is any string of letters separated by one or more non-letters, excluding apostrophes. Thus, the phrase
"don't talk to grown-ups" contains 5 words.

Examples: A = 'life, don''t talk to me about life.'
              y = initialcaps(A)
                  y =
                    Life, Don't Talk To Me About Life.

             y = initialcaps(A,1)
                  y =
                    Life, don't talk to me about life.

              y = initialcaps(A,[2 3])
                  y =
                    life, Don't Talk to me about life.

              y = initialcaps(A,[2,5:7])
                  y =
                    life, Don't talk to Me About Life.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Jerome from France for the vectorized code (vastly nicer than my original clunker), and thanks to John D'Errico for the suggestion regarding inclusion of a second input argument.

See also UPPER, LOWER, HEADLINE.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.1.0 (R14SP3)

[John D'Errico]

A useful tool.

I'm never happy though. Why not provide an option to allow the user to force all words in a sentence to be capitalized, or only the first word of every sentence?

Thus the default behavior of initial caps would be as it is currently, but the user could also specify an option to modify that behavior.

s = initialcaps(s,'sentence');

The calls below would be equivalent.

s = initialcaps(s);
s = initialcaps(s,'word');