title casing and Abbreviations in javascript

Question

I am trying to Titlecase some text which contains corporate names and their stock symbols.

Example (these strings are concatenated as corporate name, which gets title cased and the symbol in parens): AT&T (T)
John Deere Inc. (DE)

These corporate names come from our database which draws them from a stock pricing service. I have it working EXCEPT for when the name is an abbreviation like AT&T

That is return, and you guessed it right, like At&t. How can I preserve casing in abbreviations. I thought to use indexof to get the position of any &'s and uppercase the two characters on either side of it but that seems hackish.

Along the lines of(pseudo code)

var indexPos = myString.indexOf("&");
var fixedString = myString.charAt(indexPos - 1).toUpperCase().charAt(indexPos + 1).toUpperCase()

Oops, forgot to include my titlecase function

function toTitleCase(str) {
    return str.replace(/([^\W_]+[^\s-]*) */g, function (txt) {
        return txt.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + txt.substr(1).toLowerCase();
    });
}

Any better suggestions?

Answer 1

A better title case function may be

function toTitleCase(str) {
    return str.replace(
        /(\b.)|(.)/g,
        function ($0, $1, $2) {
            return ($1 && $1.toUpperCase()) || $2.toLowerCase();
        }
    );
}
toTitleCase("foo bAR&bAz a.e.i."); // "Foo Bar&Baz A.E.I."

This will still transform AT&T to At&T, but there's no information in the way it's written to know what to do, so finally

// specific fixes
     if (str === "At&T"  ) str = "AT&T";
else if (str === "Iphone") str = "iPhone";
// etc 
// or
var dict = {
    "At&T": "AT&T",
    "Iphone": "iPhone"
};
str = dict[str] || str;

Though of course if you can do it right when you enter the data in the first place it will save you a lot of trouble

Answer 2

This is a general solution for title case, without taking your extra requirements of "abbreviations" into account:

  var fixedString = String(myString).toLowerCase().replace(/\b\w/g, String.toUpperCase);

Although I agree with other posters that it's better to start with the data in the correct format in the first place. Not all proper names conform to title case, with just a couple examples being "Werner von Braun" and "Ronald McDonald." There's really no algorithm you can program into a computer to handle the often arbitrary capitalization of proper names, just like you can't really program a computer to spell check proper names.

However, you can certainly program in some exception cases, although I'm still not sure that simply assuming that any word with an ampersand in it should be in all caps always appropriate either. But that can be accomplished like so:

var titleCase = String(myString).toLowerCase().replace(/\b\w/g, String.toUpperCase);
var fixedString = titleCase.replace(/\b\w*\&\w*\b/g, String.toUpperCase);

Note that your second example of "John Deere Inc. (DE)" still isn't handled properly, though. I suppose you could add some other logic to say, put anything word between parentheses in all caps, like so:

var titleCase = String(myString).toLowerCase().replace(/\b\w/g, String.toUpperCase);
var titleCaseCapAmps = titleCase.replace(/\b\w*\&\w*\b/g, String.toUpperCase);
var fixedString = titleCaseCapAmps.replace(/\(.*\)/g, String.toUpperCase);

Which will at least handle your two examples correctly.

Answer 3

How about this: Since the number of registered companies with the stock exchange is finite, and there's a well-defined mapping between stock symbols and company names, your best best is probably to program that mapping into your code, to look up the company name by the ticker abbreviation, something like this:

var TickerToName = 
{
    A: "Agilent Technologies",
    AA: "Alcoa Inc.",
    // etc., etc.
}

Then it's just a simple lookup to get the company name from the ticker symbol:

var symbol = "T";
var CompanyName = TickerToName[symbol] || "Unknown ticker symbol: " + symbol;

Of course, I would be very surprised if there was not already some kind of Web Service you could call to get back a company name from a stock ticker symbol, something like in this thread: Stock ticker symbol lookup API

Or maybe there's some functionality like this in the stock pricing service you're using to get the data in the first place.

Answer 4

The last time I faced this situation, I decided that it was less trouble to simply include the few exceptions here and there as need.

var titleCaseFix = {
  "At&t": "AT&T"
}


var fixit(str) {
  foreach (var oldCase in titleCaseFix) {
    var newCase = titleCaseFix[oldCase];

    // Look here for various string replace options:
    // http://stackoverflow.com/questions/542232/in-javascript-how-can-i-perform-a-global-replace-on-string-with-a-variable-insi    


  }
  return str;
}