Capitalize first letter in string if first character is not letter?

Question

I'd like to capitalize the first letter in a string. The string will be a hash (and therefore mostly numbers), so string.title() won't work, because a string like 85033ba6c would be changed to 85033Ba6C, not 85033Ba6c, because the number seperates words, confusing title(). I'd like to capitalize the first letter of a string, no matter how far into the string the letter is. Is there a function for this?

if you change a letter in a hash, it changes its meaning, rendering it virtually useless. — njzk2, Jun 14 '13 at 15:54
@njzk2 I'm not using it to check the validity of anything, just to create meaningless data out of meaningful data — tkbx, Jun 14 '13 at 15:56
@njzk2 If you capitalize a letter in a hash encoded as hexadecimal digits, as is very, very, very, very, very common, the meaning doesn't change. — millimoose, Jun 14 '13 at 16:06
@BlaXpirit: the problem is, the answers there are not particularly helpful. — georg, Jun 14 '13 at 16:10
@millimoose: "solved the problem" is not enough for StackOverflow. It must be clean, smart, concise, robust and helpful for everyone else. Just like the Ashwini's one below. — georg, Jun 14 '13 at 16:13
@thg435 Those are subjective qualities that you could split hairs over ad nauseam to the point of making the flagging meaningless. — millimoose, Jun 14 '13 at 16:16
@millimoose: Let's not question the obvious: the answer here is far better than there. So it was a good thing that we reopened and answered the question. — georg, Jun 14 '13 at 16:24
@thg435 Thing is, I don't see the "far better". It's more robust (it handles the one known edge case), at the cost of being less straightforward, also doesn't handle Unicode input (which is not relevant for the stated use case but still) and the whole thing is a wash and hopefully you see what I mean by hair splitting now. (And I also consider robustness a "nice to have", not a requirement for SO answers.) — millimoose, Jun 14 '13 at 16:33
@tkbx: thanks ;) Although I'd rather delete mine as it's basically a dupe of Ashwini's. — georg, Jun 14 '13 at 16:35

score 10 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 14 '13 at 16:03

10

Using re.sub with count:

>>> strs = '85033ba6c'
>>> re.sub(r'[A-Za-z]',lambda m:m.group(0).upper(),strs,1)
'85033Ba6c'

answered Jun 14 '13 at 16:03

Ashwini Chaudhary

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yeah, I forgot about `count`. Very neat! – georg Jun 14 '13 at 16:06

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 14 '13 at 16:01

It is assumed in this answer that there is at least one character in the string where isalpha will return True (otherwise, this raises StopIteration)

i,letter = next(x for x in enumerate(myhash) if x[1].isalpha())
new_string = ''.join((myhash[:i],letter.upper(),myhash[i+1:]))

Here, I pick out the character (and index) of the first alpha character in the string. I turn that character into an uppercase character and I join the rest of the string with it.

Capitalize first letter in string if first character is not letter?

2 Answers2