NAME

Text::Capitalize - capitalize strings ("to WORK AS titles" becomes "To Work as Titles")

SYNOPSIS

use Text::Capitalize;

print capitalize("...and justice for all"), "\n";
   ...And Justice For All

print capitalize_title("...and justice for all"), "\n";
   ...And Justice for All

print capitalize_title("agent of SFPUG", PRESERVE_ALLCAPS=>1 ), "\n";
   Agent of SFPUG

print capitalize_title("the ring:  symbol or cliche?", PRESERVE_WHITESPACE=>1 ), "\n";
   The Ring:  Symbol or Cliche?
   (Note, double-space after colon is still there.)

ABSTRACT

Text::Capitalize is for capitalizing strings in a manner 
suitable for use in titles. 

DESCRIPTION

Text::Capitalize provides a few different flavors of procedures for title-like formatting for strings.

For the "capitalize" function (originally created to put pretty looking names to MP3 files) Title-like formatting consists of ensuring that the first letter of each word is uppercase, and that the rest is lowercase.

The "capitalize_title" function tries to get closer to English title capitalization rules (discussed below) where only the "important" words are supposed to be capitalized. There are also some customization features provided to allow the user to choose variant rules.

Examples of title formatting with "capitalize":

'overkill' becomes 'Overkill'

'KiLLiNG TiMe' becomes 'Killing Time'

Some simple examples of title formatting with "capitalize_title":

'we have come to wound the autumnal city' becomes 'We Have Come to Wound the Autumnal City'

'ask not for whom they ask not' becomes 'Ask not for Whom They Ask Not'

BACKGROUND

The capitalize_title function makes an attempt at doing the right thing by default. The goal is to take an arbitrary chunk of text and adjust it automatically so that it can be used as a title... But as with many aspects of the human languages, it is extremely difficult to come up with a set of programmatic rules that will cover all cases.

Words that don't get capitalized

This web page:

http://www.continentallocating.com/World.Literature/General2/LiteraryTitles2.htm

presents some admirably clear rules for capitalizing titles:

ALL words in EVERY title are capitalized except

(1) a, an, and the,

(2) two and three letter conjunctions (and, or, nor, for, but, so, yet), 

(3) prepositions.  

Exceptions:  The first and last words are always capitalized even 
if they are among the above three groups.

But consider the case:

"It Waits Underneath the Sea"

Should the word "underneath" be downcased because it's a preposition? Most English speakers would be surprised to see it that way. Consequently, the default exception to capitalization list in this module only includes the shortest of the common prepositions (to of by at for but in).

The default entries on the exception list are:

a an the 
and or nor for but so yet 
to of by at for but in with has
de von
s re t d

The observant may note that the last rows are not composed of English words. The honorary "de" has been included solely in honor of "Honore de Balzac". While I was at it, I added "von" for the sake of equal time.

The very last row is not composed of words at all: these are fragments to facilitate handling cases like "it's", "they're", "isn't" and "you'd". Otherwise, as written, this program would behave as though the fragment after the apostrophe was a separate word, and "Hell's" would become "Hell'S".

Note: future versions may attempt to treat an apostrophe as a word character instead, in which case, the last row would be removed from the default exception list. But that approach would have it's own difficulties, involving disambiguating single quotes.

Customizing the Exceptions to Capitalization

If you have different ideas about the "rules" of English (or if you're trying to use this code with another language with different rules) you might like to substitute a new exception list of your own:

print capitalize_title("Dude, we, like, went to Old Slavy, and uh, they didn't have it",
                       NOT_CAPITALIZED => [qw(uh duh huh wha like man you know)]);

This should output:
    Dude, We, like, Went To Old Slavy, And uh, They Didn'T Have It
(Note the problem with "Didn'T", caused by omitting the group of suffixes: "s re t d")

Less radically, you might like to simply add a word to the list, for example "from":

use Text::Capitalize 0.2 qw(capitalize_title @exceptions);
push @exceptions, "from";

print capitalize_title("fungi from yuggoth", 
                       NOT_CAPITALIZED => \@exceptions);

This should output:
    Fungi from Yuggoth

All Uppercase Words

In order to work with a wide range of input strings, by default capitalize_title presumes that upper-case input needs to be adjusted (e.g. "DOOM APPROACHES!" would become "Doom Approaches!"). But, this doesn't allow for the possibility of an acronym in a title (e.g. "RAM Prices Plummet" ideally should not become "Ram Prices Plummet"). If the PRESERVE_ALLCAPS option is set, then it will be presumed that an all-uppercase word is that way for a reason, and will be left alone:

print capitalize_title("ram more RAM down your throat", 
                    PRESERVE_ALLCAPS => 1);

Ram More RAM Down Your Throat

Preserving Any Usage of Uppercase for Mixed-case Words

There are some other odd cases that cannot be handled well by the default settings, notably mixed-case words such as "iMac", "CHiPs", and so on. For these purposes, a PRESERVE_ANYCAPS option has been provided which presumes that any usage of uppercase is there for a reason, and the entire word should be passed through untouched. With PRESERVE_ANYCAPS on, only the case of all lowercase words will ever be adjusted:

print capitalize_title("TLAs i have known and loved", 
                   PRESERVE_ANYCAPS => 1);

TLAs I Have Known and Loved

print capitalize_title("the next iMac: just another NeXt?", 
                       PRESERVE_ANYCAPS => 1);

The Next iMac: Just Another NeXt?

Handling Whitespace

By default, the capitalize_title function presumes that you're trying to clean up potential title strings. As an extra feature it collapses multiple spaces and tabs into single spaces. If this feature doesn't seem desirable and you want it to literally restrict itself to adjusting capitalization, you can force that behavior with the PRESERVE_WHITESPACE option:

print capitalize_title("it came from texas:  the new new world order?", 
                       PRESERVE_WHITESPACE => 1);

It Came From Texas:  The New New World Order?
(Note: the double-space after the colon is still there.)

Comparison to Text::Autoformat

As you might expect, there's more than one way to do this, and these two pieces of code perform very similar functions:

use Text::Capitalize 0.2;
print capitalize_title($t), "\n";

use Text::Autoformat;
print autoformat{case => "highlight", right=>length($t)}, $t;

(Note: supplying the length of the string as the "right margin" is a performance hack: this is much faster than plugging in an arbitrarily large number. The "fill" parameter doesn't appear to work to turn off line-breaking, but possibly it will in the future.)

As of this writing, "capitalize_title" has some advantages:

1. It works on characters outside the English 7-bit ASCII range, for example with my locale setting the ISO-8859-1 International characters are handled correctly, so that "über maus" becomes "Über Maus".

2. Minor words following leading punctuation become upper case:

   "...And Justice for All"

3. It works with multiple sentence input (e.g. "And sooner. And later." should probably not be "And sooner. and later.")

4. The list of minor words is more extensive (i.e. includes: so, yet, nor), and is also customizeable.

5. There's a method of preserving acronyms via the PRESERVE_ALLCAPS flag and similarly, mixed-case words ("iMac", "NeXt", etc") with the PRESERVE_ANYCAPS flag.

6. It's roughly ten times faster.

Another difference is that Text::Autoformat's "highlight" always preserves whitespace something like capitalize_title does with the PRESERVE_WHITESPACE option set.

However, it should be pointed out that Text::Autoformat is under active maintenance by Damian Conway (and does far more than this module does): it's recommended that you look into using it.

EXPORT

By default, this version of the module provides the two functions capitalize and capitalize_title. Future versions will have no further additions to the default export list.

It is also possible to export:

• The list of minor words that capitalize_title uses by default to determine the exceptions to capitalization: @exceptions.

• The hash of allowed arguments (with defaults) that the capitalize_title function uses: %defaults-capitalize_title.

BUGS

(1) In capitalize_title, quoted sentence terminators are treated 
as actual sentence breaks, e.g. in this case: 

   'say "yes but!", say "know what?"'

The program sees the ! and effectively treats this as 
two separate sentences: the word "but" becomes "But", 
under the rule that last words must always be
uppercase, even if they're on the exception list.

(2) In capitalize_title, a string like: 

    "The Next iMac: Just Another NeXt?" 

Is not handled well, even with the PRESERVE_ANYCAPS 
flag turned on.  Here, "iMac" is treated as the last 
word of a sentence and is forcibly capitalized as "IMac".

SEE ALSO

Text::Autoformat

VERSION

Version 0.2

AUTHORS

Joseph M. Brenner 
   E-Mail:   doom@kzsu.stanford.edu
   Homepage: http://www.grin.net/~mirthless/

Stanislaw Y. Pusep
   E-Mail:	stanis@linuxmail.org
   ICQ UIN:	11979567
   Homepage:	http://sysdlabs.hypermart.net/

(And many thanks to Belden Lyman, for feature 
suggestions and code examples.)

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2003 by Joseph Brenner. All rights reserved.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

cpanm Text::Capitalize

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Text::Capitalize