Making a Script That Transforms Sentences to Title Case?
I Have a Command That I Use to Transform Sentences to Title Case. It Is Inefficient to Have to Copy This Command out of a Text File, and Then Paste It into the...
I have a command that I use to transform sentences to title case. It is inefficient to have to copy this command out of a text file, and then paste it into the terminal before then also pasting in the sentence I want converted. The command is:
echo "my text" | sed 's/.*/\L&/; s/[a-z]*/\u&/g'
How can I convert this to a script so I can just call something like the following from the terminal:
TitleCaseConverter "my text"
Is it possible to create such a script? Is it possible to make it work from any folder location?
3 Answers
Since bash's parameter expansion includes case modification, there's no need for sed. Just a short function:
tc() { set ${*,,} ; echo ${*^} ; }
Test (don't use quotes, since a title is typically no longer than a sentence, it shouldn't matter):
tc FOO bar
Output:
Foo Bar
Fancy version that avoids capitalizing some conjunctions, articles and such:
ftc() { set ${*,,} ; set ${*^} ; echo -n "$1 " ; shift 1 ; \
for f in ${*} ; do \
case $f in A|The|Is|Of|And|Or|But|About|To|In|By) \
echo -n "${f,,} " ;; \
*) echo -n "$f " ;; \
esac ; \
done ; echo ; }
Test:
ftc the last of the mohicans
Output:
The Last of the Mohicans
How about just wrapping it into a function in .bashrc or .bash_profile and source it from the current shell
TitleCaseConverter() {
sed 's/.*/\L&/; s/[a-z]*/\u&/g' <<<"$1"
}
or) if you want it pitch-perfect to avoid any sorts of trailing new lines from the input arguments do
printf "%s" "$1" | sed 's/.*/\L&/; s/[a-z]*/\u&/g'
Now you can source the file once from the command line to make the function available, do
source ~/.bash_profile
Now you can use it in the command line directly as
str="my text"
newstr="$(TitleCaseConverter "$str")"
printf "%s\n" "$newstr"
My Text
Also to your question,
How can I convert this to a script so I can just call something like the following from the terminal
Adding the function to one of the start-up files takes care of that, recommend adding it to .bash_profile more though.
TitleCaseConverter "this is stackoverflow"
This Is Stackoverflow
Update:
OP was trying to create a directory with the name returned from the function call, something like below
mkdir "$(TitleCaseConverter "this is stackoverflow")"
The key again here is to double-quote the command-substitution to avoid undergoing word-splitting by shell.
I don't have comment privs, but slight improvement to ManUnitedBloke's answer, this will handle contractions like "don't" and "who's".
echo "my text" | sed 's/.*/\L&/; s/[a-z']*/\u&/g'
Marcus Vance is a cybersecurity auditor and technology writer dedicated to educating the public about online safety, data privacy regulations, enterprise security, and emerging cyber threats.
