ucwords() vs title case

Hi internals,

I came across this old bug: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=34407

The desired behaviour for that particular person:

"the (world) now" => "The (World) Now"

Currently PHP adopts a very simple rule:

1. Capitalise first character (no matter what it is)
2. Capitalise character preceded by a space, tab, etc.

Using string.title() from Python you'd get the expected behaviour; they use:

1. Capitalise first letter of a word
2. Lowercase subsequent letters of a word
3. Non-letters delimit words

Personally I find that the latter is too much of a departure from what we
currently have; a compromise could be to treat punctuation as a word
delimiter.

Hmm. Why not make it follow what \b in a regex would do, looking for “word boundaries”?

Andrea Faulds
http://ajf.me/

2014-06-30 13:54 GMT+02:00 Tjerk Meesters tjerk.meesters@gmail.com:

Hi internals,

I came across this old bug: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=34407

The desired behaviour for that particular person:

"the (world) now" => "The (World) Now"

Currently PHP adopts a very simple rule:

1. Capitalise first character (no matter what it is)
2. Capitalise character preceded by a space, tab, etc.

Using string.title() from Python you'd get the expected behaviour; they
use:

1. Capitalise first letter of a word
2. Lowercase subsequent letters of a word

Actually letting a function "uppercase first (letter)" lowercase all
subsequent would be even more unexpected.

3. Non-letters delimit words

Personally I find that the latter is too much of a departure from what we
currently have; a compromise could be to treat punctuation as a word
delimiter.

Thoughts?

--

Tjerk

--
github.com/KingCrunch

Hi Kris,

On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 5:33 AM, Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com
wrote:

Andrea Faulds wrote (on 30/06/2014):

On 30 Jun 2014, at 12:54, Tjerk Meesters tjerk.meesters@gmail.com
wrote:

Hi internals,

I came across this old bug: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=34407

Personally I find that the latter is too much of a departure from what
we
currently have; a compromise could be to treat punctuation as a word
delimiter.

Hmm. Why not make it follow what \b in a regex would do, looking for
“word boundaries”?

Unfortunately, the cleverer you try to be, the more edge cases you find.
For instance, using \b will capitalise the 's' after an apostrophe, e.g.
in
"Andrea'S Suggestion".

The function we have in our code base at the moment looks like this:

function smart_uc_words($string)
{
$string = strtolower(trim($string));
// Capitalise any word char preceded by a non-word char other
than
an apostrophe
$string = preg_replace_callback('/(?<!\w|')(\w)/', function($m){
return strtoupper($m[1]); }, $string);
// Capitalise any word char which comes between an apostrophe and
another word char
$string = preg_replace_callback('/(?<=')(\w)(?=\w)/',
function($m){ return strtoupper($m[1]); }, $string);

    return $string;

}

What about leaving the default behavior as-is but adding an optional
argument to specify how to determine these boundaries? So if you did
something like ucwords( "hello, world!", '\b' ) or ucwords( "hello,
world!", array( ' ', '.', ... ) ), the user could control the behavior
while existing ucwords( $arg ) code would behave as it does now without any
BC.

Yeah, that seems like an option, so basically how trim() works too; treat
these characters as word boundaries (default is " \t\r\n").

ucwords("hello (new) world", " ()");

I'll prepare a PR for this and see how far that takes us :) let me know if
you guys have any other ideas.

--Kris

--

Tjerk