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powershellcamelcasing

How to detect CamelCase using Powershell

I would like to split song names that are in the form ArtistTitle so that they end up as Artist - Title

Is there a way in Powershell to detect the CamelCase boundary and perform the replacement? This should only affect the first case boundary and ignore the rest.

Solution

  • You can use a case sensitive regular expression to split the string right before any upper case character, remove empty elements and then join what's left with a dash:

    PS> 'ArtistTitle' -csplit '(?=[A-Z])' -ne '' -join '-'
Artist-Title

    To split just the first word, use the second parameter of the Split operator (Max-substrings) to specifys the maximum number of substrings returned. See the about_Split help topic for more information:

    PS> 'ArtistVeryLongAlbumTitle' -csplit '(?=[A-Z])',3  -ne '' -join '-'
Artist-VeryLongAlbumTitle

    UPDATE: I was able to make the command shorter by using a regex pattern that doesn't split an uppercase char if it is the first one (at the beginning of the string) so an empty item is not created:

    PS>  'ArtistVeryLongAlbumTitle' -csplit '(?<!^)(?=[A-Z])',2 -join '-'
Artist-VeryLongAlbumTitle