Capitalizing letters. R equivalent of excel "PROPER" function

Question

Colleagues,

I'm looking at a data frame resembling the extract below:

Month   Provider Items
January CofCom   25
july    CofCom   331
march   vobix    12
May     vobix    0

I would like to capitalise first letter of each word and lower the remaining letters for each word. This would result in the data frame resembling the one below:

Month   Provider Items
January Cofcom   25
July    Cofcom   331
March   Vobix    12
May     Vobix    0

In a word, I'm looking for R's equivalent of the ROPER function available in the MS Excel.

Answer 1

The question is about an equivalent of Excel PROPER and the (former) accepted answer is based on:

proper=function(x) paste0(toupper(substr(x, 1, 1)), tolower(substring(x, 2)))

It might be worth noting that:

proper("hello world")
## [1] "Hello world"

Excel PROPER would give, instead, "Hello World". For 1:1 mapping with Excel see @Matthew Plourde.

If what you actually need is to set only the first character of a string to upper-case, you might also consider the shorter and slightly faster version:

proper=function(s) sub("(.)", ("\\U\\1"), tolower(s), pe=TRUE)