I've been looking around, and I am wondering whether there is a simple way to capitalize all words in a UITextField, while leaving certain words (such as of, the, or, etc.) lowercase, unless they are the first word of the phrase.
This is an
Example of the Effect I'm Trying to Convey.
One of the methods I've found is to search the text field value for the certain words and replace them with lowercase versions, as the user types a new word or character, perhaps listening for the space bar.
I'm not sure if the method above is best practice, or whether my searches haven't been broad enough to find a solution already in the mix.
I was originally thinking something along these "pseudocode" lines:
When value of textfield is changed
Get current value textfield
For each word in value:
If the word matches ("For", "Of", "The", etc.) and the word is not the first word in the value:
Change the word to lowercase, and replace word
Go to next word
My actual question is mainly one of performance. Would this method be overly strenuous on my application? If so, are there any better solutions?
Thank you all for your assistance!
Update:
Thanks to holex, cluemein, and others who have already commented and answered. I will try your solutions when I get the opportunity to do so.
A better way then converting the words to lowercase is to capitalize the words that are NOT those words you specified. Set up if statements to capitalize the beginning letter of the first word, and to capitalize the words following that if they are not the words you specified. Then, if you want to make sure the specified words weren't capitalized after the first word, use an else statement. "pseudocode" example:
Capitalize letter of first word;
Move on to next word;
While not end of textfield (or while typing):
if word is not ("the"|"and"|"of"|"or"|...):
capitalize first letter;
else:
set first letter to lowercase;
move to next word at space;
This will on average be roughly twice as fast as going back through the text looking for the specified words in terms of runtime. This isn't the code you would use, but the algorithm you would implement. Also, take into account what holex said about spaces. I leave how you implement this algorithm up to you. Just to clarify, this algorithm is for both autocapitalizng and auto-setting to lower case.
Related
I need to mark occurrences in words where it can be hyphenated if there's not enough rough, e.g.
loremip|sum
so if there's enough room, it should show loremipsum if not, it should be loremip- on the first line, sum on the second.
Bonus point: if the character is ignored by search, i.e. searching for loremips would find that occurrence. Does something like that exist on iOS?
Using NSParagraphStyle isn't enough as it splits the words at points where it isn't allowed (note: I'm using german). Also I would like to use words not really common as they are dialect.
I have a string eg. String-aa. I want to be able to capitalise every letter after the "-". Is there a straightforward was of achieving this?
I am aware of .capitalize however dont know how to implement for this particular requirement.
You can make use of block form of gsub
"String-aa-bbbb".gsub(/-\w+/){|e| e.upcase}
#=> "String-AA-BBBB"
The above code will capture a letter followed by - and will capitalize it
I have a problem that requires me to write a regex that finds a line that containing exactly 3 groups of characters (it could be words or numbers) and that ends with another specific word. The way I had in mind was to find a pattern that ended in a space, and look for it 3 times. assuming this is the correct way to go about it, I do no know how to find a space, but I thought it would look like .*"find a space"{3} endword$. Is this the way it would be done? Even if it is not the way to do it how do you find a space? Any suggestions?
Assuming by three groups of words you would accept any non-space character, you could write:
/^\s*(?:\S+\s+){3}endword$/
The initial caret is to make sure you have exactly 3 non-space groups on the line.
Of course you need to consider whether things like control characters could appear, and adjust accordingly.
Depending on your flavor, something like the below would do it:
\b+.+?\b+.+?\b+.+?\bendword$
This makes use of the word boundary mark (\b) and non-greedy repetitions (+?), so it may be slightly different in your specific implementation, especially if you're using something old like grep.
I have a list of approx 100,000 names I need to process. Some are business names, some are people names. Unfortunately, some are lower, some are upper, and some are mixed. I am looking for a routine to convert them to proper case. (Sometimes called Mixed or Title case). I realize I can just loop through the string and capitalize every character that starts a new word. That would be an incredibly simplistic approach. For businesses, short words should be lowercase (of, with, for, ...). For last names, if it starts with Mc, the 3rd letter should be capitalized (McDermot, McDonald, etc). Roman numerals should always be capitalized (John Smith II ), etc.
I have not been able to find any Delphi built in, or otherwise, routines. Surely this is out there. Where can I find this?
Thanks
As it was already said by others, making a fully automated routine for this is nearly impossible due to so many special variations. So leaving out the human interaction completely is almost impossible.
Now what you can do instead is to make this much easier for human to solve. How? Make a dictionary of all the name variations in Lowercase and present it to him.
Before presenting the names you can make sure that the first letter in any of the names is already capitalized.
Once all name correction has been made in dictionary you go and automatically replace all the names in original database.
I'm trying to use CFStringTokenizer with kCFStringTokenizerUnitSentence to split a string into sentences. The first problem I'm having is that sentences need to be capitalized in order for them to be recognized as sentences. If not, it just thinks it's part of the previous sentence.
I'm splitting user-entered text so I'm expecting the text to be very unclean.
Is there something else I can do with CFStringTokenizer to have it detect uncapitalized sentences? Or will I have to use another method of splitting altogether?
I followed the answer on this SO question for my implementation:
How to get an array of sentences using CFStringTokenizer?
NOTE: After testing a bit more it seems that with kCFStringTokenizerUnitSentence, if a '!' or a '?' is followed by an uncapitalized sentence, it will recognize the sentence. Also, if one of those punctuation marks is followed by a sentence without a space between the '!' and the first word, it will still separate.
So the one case I need to work around is a '.' followed by an uncapitalized sentence.
ANOTHER OPTION I found, if you're getting the text from a textField, is to use this:
textField.autocapitalizationType = UITextAutocapitalizationTypeSentences;
It will automatically capitalize sentences so you don't have to worry about converting for CFStringTokenizer. It still doesn't account for edge cases like abbreviations, but at least in my case the user will have an option to delete the auto-capitalization if it's wrong.
You can convert the input string to all uppercase first and then run it through CFStringTokenizer and use the ranges to get the substrings of the original input string. But you must be careful here because some characters might become more than 1 character after conversion to uppercase.