CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonstringpython-3.x
Maggie K
Maggie K

Reputation: 39

Uncapitalizing first letter of a name

To code a name like DeAnna you type:

name = "de\aanna"

and 

print(name.title())

In this code \a capitalizes a normally uncapitalized letter. What do you code to produce a name like "George von Trapp" where I want to uncapitalize a normally capitalized letter?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 472

Answers (3)

MisterMiyagi
MisterMiyagi

Reputation: 51989

The \a does not capitalize a letter - it is the bell escape sequence.

The str.title simply capitalizes the first letter of any group of letters. Since the bell is not a letter, it has the same meaning as a space. The following produces equivalent capitalization:

name = "de anna"
print(name.title())

Anyways, there are no capitalize/uncapitalize magic characters in python. Simply write the name properly. If you want both a proper and a lower-case version, create the later via str.lower:

name = "George von Trapp"
print(name, ':', name.lower())

If you really want to go from "georg van trapp" (I'm just pretending the discussion about \a is over) to "Georg van Trapp" - welcome to having-to-decide-about-the-semantics-of-the-language-you-are-emulating.

  • A simple approach is to upper-case every word, but fix some known ones.

    name = "georg van trapp"
proper_name = name.title()
proper_name.replace(' Von ', ' von ').replace(' Zu ', ' zu ').replace(' De ', ' de ')
print(name, ':', proper_name)

  • You can do that with a list-and-loop approach for less headache as well:

    lc_words = ['von', 'van', 'zu', 'von und zu', 'de', "d'", 'av', 'af', 'der', 'Teer', "'t", "'n", "'s"]
name = "georg van trapp"
proper_name = name.title()
for word in lc_words:
    proper_name = proper_name.replace(' %s ' % word.title(), ' %s ' % word)
print(name, ':', proper_name)

  • If names are of the form First Second byword Last, you can capitalize everything but the second-to-last word:

    name = "georg fritz ferdinand hannibal van trapp"
proper_name = name.title().split()  # gets you the *individual* words, capitalized
proper_name = ' '.join(proper_name[:-2] + [proper_name[-2].lower(), proper_name[-1]])
print(name, ':', proper_name)

  • Any words that are shorter than four letters (warning, not feasible for some names!!!)

    name = "georg fritz theodores ferdinand markus hannibal von und zu trapp"
proper_name = ' '.join(word.title() if len(word) > 3 else word.lower() for word in name.split())
print(name, ':', proper_name)

Upvotes: 5

TheF1rstPancake
TheF1rstPancake

Reputation: 2378

Why not just roll your own function for it?

 def capitalizeName(name):
     #split the name on spaces
     parts = name.split(" ")

     # define a list of words to not capitalize
     do_not_cap = ['von']

     # for each part of the name,
     # force the word to lowercase
     # then check if it is a word in our forbidden list
     # if it is not, then go ahead and capitalize it
     # this will leave words in that list in their uncapitalized state
     for i,p in enumerate(parts):
          parts[i] = p.lower()
          if p.lower() not in do_not_cap:
              parts[i] = p.title()

      # rejoin the parts of the word
      return " ".join(parts)

The point to the do_not_cap list is that allows you to further define parts you may not want to capitalize very easily. For example, some names may have a "de" in it you may not want capitalized.

This is what it looks like with an example:

name = "geOrge Von Trapp"
capitalizeName(name)
# "George von Trapp"

Upvotes: 1

nalzok
nalzok

Reputation: 16127

What do you code to produce a name like "George von Trapp" where I want to uncapitalize a normally capitalized letter?

Letters are not auto-capitalized in Python. In your case, "de\aanna"(I think you should use "de anna" instead) is capitalised because you called title() on it. If I didn't misunderstand your question, what you want is simply to disable such "auto-capitalizing".

Just don't call title():

name = "George von Trapp"
print(name.lower())

Upvotes: -1

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