I would like to capitalize the first letter of each word in a column, without converting remaining letters to lowercase. I am trying to use stringr since its vectorized and plays well with dataframes, but would also use another solution. Below is a reprex showing my desired output and various attempts. I am able to select the first letter only, but then not sure how to capitalize it. Thank you for your help!
I also reviewed related posts, but wasn't sure how to apply those solutions in my case (i.e., within a dataframe):
Capitalize the first letter of both words in a two word string
library(dplyr)
library(stringr)
words <-
tribble(
~word, ~number,
"problems", 99,
"Answer", 42,
"golden ratio", 1.61,
"NOTHING", 0
)
# Desired output
new_words <-
tribble(
~word, ~number,
"Problems", 99,
"Answer", 42,
"Golden Ratio", 1.61,
"NOTHING", 0
)
# Converts first letter of each word to upper and all other to lower
mutate(words, word = str_to_title(word))
#> # A tibble: 4 x 2
#> word number
#> <chr> <dbl>
#> 1 Problems 99
#> 2 Answer 42
#> 3 Golden Ratio 1.61
#> 4 Nothing 0
# Some attempts
mutate(words, word = str_replace_all(word, "(?<=^|\\s)([a-zA-Z])", "X"))
#> # A tibble: 4 x 2
#> word number
#> <chr> <dbl>
#> 1 Xroblems 99
#> 2 Xnswer 42
#> 3 Xolden Xatio 1.61
#> 4 XOTHING 0
mutate(words, word = str_replace_all(word, "(?<=^|\\s)([a-zA-Z])", "\\1"))
#> # A tibble: 4 x 2
#> word number
#> <chr> <dbl>
#> 1 problems 99
#> 2 Answer 42
#> 3 golden ratio 1.61
#> 4 NOTHING 0
Created on 2021-07-26 by the reprex package (v2.0.0)
Here is a base R solution using gsub:
words$word <- gsub("\\b([a-z])", "\\U\\1", words$word, perl=TRUE)
This will replace the first lowercase letter of every word with its uppercase version. Note that the \b word boundary will match a lowercase preceded by either whitespace or the start of the column's value.