How to capitalize the first character of each word

Question

Is there a function built into Java that capitalizes the first character of each word in a String, and does not affect the others?

Examples:

• jon skeet -> Jon Skeet
• miles o'Brien -> Miles O'Brien (B remains capital, this rules out Title Case)
• old mcdonald -> Old Mcdonald*

*(Old McDonald would be find too, but I don't expect it to be THAT smart.)

A quick look at the Java String Documentation reveals only toUpperCase() and toLowerCase(), which of course do not provide the desired behavior. Naturally, Google results are dominated by those two functions. It seems like a wheel that must have been invented already, so it couldn't hurt to ask so I can use it in the future.

Answer 1

This is just another way of doing it:

private String capitalize(String line)
{
    StringTokenizer token =new StringTokenizer(line);
    String CapLine="";
    while(token.hasMoreTokens())
    {
        String tok = token.nextToken().toString();
        CapLine += Character.toUpperCase(tok.charAt(0))+ tok.substring(1)+" ";        
    }
    return CapLine.substring(0,CapLine.length()-1);
}

Answer 2

From Java 9+

you can use String::replceAll like this :

public static void upperCaseAllFirstCharacter(String text) {
    String regex = "\\b(.)(.*?)\\b";
    String result = Pattern.compile(regex).matcher(text).replaceAll(
            matche -> matche.group(1).toUpperCase() + matche.group(2)
    );

    System.out.println(result);
}

Example :

upperCaseAllFirstCharacter("hello this is Just a test");

Outputs

Hello This Is Just A Test

Answer 3

Here is a simple function

public static String capEachWord(String source){
    String result = "";
    String[] splitString = source.split(" ");
    for(String target : splitString){
        result += Character.toUpperCase(target.charAt(0))
                + target.substring(1) + " ";
    }
    return result.trim();
}

Answer 4

String s="hi dude i                                 want apple";
    s = s.replaceAll("\\s+"," ");
    String[] split = s.split(" ");
    s="";
    for (int i = 0; i < split.length; i++) {
        split[i]=Character.toUpperCase(split[i].charAt(0))+split[i].substring(1);
        s+=split[i]+" ";
        System.out.println(split[i]);
    }
    System.out.println(s);

Answer 5

I made a solution in Java 8 that is IMHO more readable.

public String firstLetterCapitalWithSingleSpace(final String words) {
    return Stream.of(words.trim().split("\\s"))
    .filter(word -> word.length() > 0)
    .map(word -> word.substring(0, 1).toUpperCase() + word.substring(1))
    .collect(Collectors.joining(" "));
}

The Gist for this solution can be found here: https://gist.github.com/Hylke1982/166a792313c5e2df9d31

Answer 6

For those of you using Velocity in your MVC, you can use the capitalizeFirstLetter() method from the StringUtils class.