[r] Capitalize the first letter of both words in a two word string

Let's say that I have a two word string and I want to capitalize both of them.

name <- c("zip code", "state", "final count")

The Hmisc package has a function capitalize which capitalized the first word, but I'm not sure how to get the second word capitalized. The help page for capitalize doesn't suggest that it can perform that task.

library(Hmisc)
capitalize(name)
# [1] "Zip code"    "State"       "Final count"

I want to get:

c("Zip Code", "State", "Final Count")

What about three-word strings:

name2 <- c("I like pizza")

Here is a slight improvement on the accepted answer that avoids having to use sapply(). Also forces non-first characters to lower.

titleCase <- Vectorize(function(x) {
  
  # Split input vector value
  s <- strsplit(x, " ")[[1]]
  
  # Perform title casing and recombine
  ret <- paste(toupper(substring(s, 1,1)), tolower(substring(s, 2)),
        sep="", collapse=" ")
  
  return(ret)
  
}, USE.NAMES = FALSE)


name <- c("zip CODE", "statE", "final couNt")

titleCase(name)

#> "Zip Code"       "State" "Final Count" 

Match a regular expression that starts at the beginning ^ or after a space [[:space:]] and is followed by an alphabetical character [[:alpha:]]. Globally (the g in gsub) replace all such occurrences with the matched beginning or space and the upper-case version of the matched alphabetical character, \\1\\U\\2. This has to be done with perl-style regular expression matching.

gsub("(^|[[:space:]])([[:alpha:]])", "\\1\\U\\2", name, perl=TRUE)
# [1] "Zip Code"    "State"       "Final Count"

In a little more detail for the replacement argument to gsub(), \\1 says 'use the part of x matching the first sub-expression', i.e., the part of x matching (^|[[:spacde:]]). Likewise, \\2 says use the part of x matching the second sub-expression ([[:alpha:]]). The \\U is syntax enabled by using perl=TRUE, and means to make the next character Upper-case. So for "Zip code", \\1 is "Zip", \\2 is "code", \\U\\2 is "Code", and \\1\\U\\2 is "Zip Code".

The ?regexp page is helpful for understanding regular expressions, ?gsub for putting things together.

The package BBmisc now contains the function capitalizeStrings.

library("BBmisc")
capitalizeStrings(c("the taIl", "wags The dOg", "That Looks fuNny!")
    , all.words = TRUE, lower.back = TRUE)
[1] "The Tail"          "Wags The Dog"      "That Looks Funny!"

Alternative:

library(stringr)
a = c("capitalise this", "and this")
a
[1] "capitalise this" "and this"       
str_to_title(a)
[1] "Capitalise This" "And This"   

You could also use the snakecase package:

install.packages("snakecase")
library(snakecase)

name <- c("zip code", "state", "final count")
to_title_case(name)
#> [1] "Zip Code"    "State"       "Final Count"

# or 
to_upper_camel_case(name, sep_out = " ")
#> [1] "Zip Code"    "State"       "Final Count"

https://github.com/Tazinho/snakecase

From the help page for ?toupper:

.simpleCap <- function(x) {
    s <- strsplit(x, " ")[[1]]
    paste(toupper(substring(s, 1,1)), substring(s, 2),
          sep="", collapse=" ")
}


> sapply(name, .simpleCap)

zip code         state   final count 
"Zip Code"       "State" "Final Count"

This gives capital Letters to all major words

library(lettercase)
xString = str_title_case(xString)

Alternative way with substring and regexpr:

substring(name, 1) <- toupper(substring(name, 1, 1))
pos <- regexpr(" ", name, perl=TRUE) + 1
substring(name, pos) <- toupper(substring(name, pos, pos))

Try:

require(Hmisc)
sapply(name, function(x) {
  paste(sapply(strsplit(x, ' '), capitalize), collapse=' ')
})

There is a build-in base-R solution for title case as well:

tools::toTitleCase("demonstrating the title case")
## [1] "Demonstrating the Title Case"

or

library(tools)
toTitleCase("demonstrating the title case")
## [1] "Demonstrating the Title Case"

Use this function from stringi package

stri_trans_totitle(c("zip code", "state", "final count"))
## [1] "Zip Code"      "State"       "Final Count" 

stri_trans_totitle("i like pizza very much")
## [1] "I Like Pizza Very Much"