How to capitalize the first letter in a String in Ruby

Question

The upcase method capitalizes the entire string, but I need to capitalize only the first letter.

Also, I need to support several popular languages, like German and Russian.

How do I do it?

Answer 1

It depends on which Ruby version you use:

Ruby 2.4 and higher:

It just works, as since Ruby v2.4.0 supports Unicode case mapping:

"мария".capitalize #=> Мария

Ruby 2.3 and lower:

"maria".capitalize #=> "Maria"
"мария".capitalize #=> мария

The problem is, it just doesn't do what you want it to, it outputs мария instead of Мария.

If you're using Rails there's an easy workaround:

"мария".mb_chars.capitalize.to_s # requires ActiveSupport::Multibyte

Otherwise, you'll have to install the unicode gem and use it like this:

require 'unicode'

Unicode::capitalize("мария") #=> Мария

Ruby 1.8:

Be sure to use the coding magic comment:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

puts "мария".capitalize

gives invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII), while:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
#coding: utf-8

puts "мария".capitalize

works without errors, but also see the "Ruby 2.3 and lower" section for real capitalization.

Answer 2

capitalize first letter of first word of string

"kirk douglas".capitalize
#=> "Kirk douglas"

capitalize first letter of each word

In rails:

"kirk douglas".titleize
=> "Kirk Douglas"

OR

"kirk_douglas".titleize
=> "Kirk Douglas"    

In ruby:

"kirk douglas".split(/ |\_|\-/).map(&:capitalize).join(" ") 
#=> "Kirk Douglas"

OR

require 'active_support/core_ext'
"kirk douglas".titleize

Answer 3

Rails 5+

As of Active Support and Rails 5.0.0.beta4 you can use one of both methods: String#upcase_first or ActiveSupport::Inflector#upcase_first.

"my API is great".upcase_first #=> "My API is great"
"мария".upcase_first           #=> "Мария"
"мария".upcase_first           #=> "Мария"
"NASA".upcase_first            #=> "NASA"
"MHz".upcase_first             #=> "MHz"
"sputnik".upcase_first         #=> "Sputnik"

Check "Rails 5: New upcase_first Method" for more info.

Answer 4

Well, just so we know how to capitalize only the first letter and leave the rest of them alone, because sometimes that is what is desired:

['NASA', 'MHz', 'sputnik'].collect do |word|
  letters = word.split('')
  letters.first.upcase!
  letters.join
end

 => ["NASA", "MHz", "Sputnik"]

Calling capitalize would result in ["Nasa", "Mhz", "Sputnik"].

Answer 5

Unfortunately, it is impossible for a machine to upcase/downcase/capitalize properly. It needs way too much contextual information for a computer to understand.

That's why Ruby's String class only supports capitalization for ASCII characters, because there it's at least somewhat well-defined.

What do I mean by "contextual information"?

For example, to capitalize i properly, you need to know which language the text is in. English, for example, has only two is: capital I without a dot and small i with a dot. But Turkish has four is: capital I without a dot, capital İ with a dot, small ı without a dot, small i with a dot. So, in English 'i'.upcase # => 'I' and in Turkish 'i'.upcase # => 'İ'. In other words: since 'i'.upcase can return two different results, depending on the language, it is obviously impossible to correctly capitalize a word without knowing its language.

But Ruby doesn't know the language, it only knows the encoding. Therefore it is impossible to properly capitalize a string with Ruby's built-in functionality.

It gets worse: even with knowing the language, it is sometimes impossible to do capitalization properly. For example, in German, 'Maße'.upcase # => 'MASSE' (Maße is the plural of Maß meaning measurement). However, 'Masse'.upcase # => 'MASSE' (meaning mass). So, what is 'MASSE'.capitalize? In other words: correctly capitalizing requires a full-blown Artificial Intelligence.

So, instead of sometimes giving the wrong answer, Ruby chooses to sometimes give no answer at all, which is why non-ASCII characters simply get ignored in downcase/upcase/capitalize operations. (Which of course also reads to wrong results, but at least it's easy to check.)

Answer 6

Use capitalize. From the String documentation:

Returns a copy of str with the first character converted to uppercase and the remainder to lowercase.

"hello".capitalize    #=> "Hello"
"HELLO".capitalize    #=> "Hello"
"123ABC".capitalize   #=> "123abc"

Answer 7

You can use mb_chars. This respects umlaute:

class String

  # Only capitalize first letter of a string
  def capitalize_first
    self[0] = self[0].mb_chars.upcase
    self
  end

end

Example:

"ümlaute".capitalize_first
#=> "Ümlaute"

Answer 8

My version:

class String
    def upcase_first
        return self if empty?
        dup.tap {|s| s[0] = s[0].upcase }
    end
    def upcase_first!
        replace upcase_first
    end
end

['NASA title', 'MHz', 'sputnik'].map &:upcase_first  #=> ["NASA title", "MHz", "Sputnik"]

Check also:
https://www.rubydoc.info/gems/activesupport/5.0.0.1/String%3Aupcase_first
https://www.rubydoc.info/gems/activesupport/5.0.0.1/ActiveSupport/Inflector#upcase_first-instance_method

Answer 9

Below is another way to capitalize each word in a string. \w doesn't match Cyrillic characters or Latin characters with diacritics but [[:word:]] does. upcase, downcase, capitalize, and swapcase didn't apply to non-ASCII characters until Ruby 2.4.0 which was released in 2016.

"aAa-BBB ä мария _a a_a".gsub(/\w+/,&:capitalize)
=> "Aaa-Bbb ä мария _a A_a"
"aAa-BBB ä мария _a a_a".gsub(/[[:word:]]+/,&:capitalize)
=> "Aaa-Bbb Ä Мария _a A_a"

[[:word:]] matches characters in these categories:

Ll (Letter, Lowercase)
Lu (Letter, Uppercase)
Lt (Letter, Titlecase)
Lo (Letter, Other)
Lm (Letter, Modifier)
Nd (Number, Decimal Digit)
Pc (Punctuation, Connector)

[[:word:]] matches all 10 of the characters in the "Punctuation, Connector" (Pc) category:

005F _ LOW LINE
203F ‿ UNDERTIE
2040 ⁀ CHARACTER TIE
2054 ⁔ INVERTED UNDERTIE
FE33 ︳ PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL LOW LINE
FE34 ︴ PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL WAVY LOW LINE
FE4D ﹍ DASHED LOW LINE
FE4E ﹎ CENTRELINE LOW LINE
FE4F ﹏ WAVY LOW LINE
FF3F ＿ FULLWIDTH LOW LINE

This is another way to only convert the first character of a string to uppercase:

"striNG".sub(/./,&:upcase)
=> "StriNG"

Answer 10

If you want to capitalize only the first character in a string in ruby, as the author requested, you should just do exactly that:

word[0] = word[0].upcase

This works for all languages and only touches the first letter of the entire string.

word = "мария"
# => "мария"
word[0] = word[0].upcase
# => "М"
word
# => "Мария"

It does not require Rails or any other libary.