Capitalize some words in a CSV file

[Toon van der Struijk]

Hi all,

I have a CSV file with a lot of columns.

The first column represents someone's firstname, the third column someone's lastname.

Both first- and lastname are not always entered with the first character in uppercase, eg.:

john,,Doe,

or

John,,doe,

or

john,,doe,

I want to change both to be capitalized and leave other data in the CSV untouched, like this:

John,,Doe,

When I do a standard 'Capitalize words' on this CSV file, well, all single words get capitalized. And I don't want that, because some column data needs to be left lowercase.

I think it can be done with Grep, but I don't know how to write the correct search and replace criteria.

Can someone help me out here?

[Steve]

When you replace a "saved group," you can specify \U to make ALL letters capitalized, \u to capitalize only the first letter of the first word, and \L and \l to make them lowercase (in the same format/manner).

You would search for

^("[^"\r]*",|[^,"\r]*,)("[^"\r]*",|[^,"\r]*,)("[^"\r]*",|[^,"\r]*,)

and replace it with

\u\1\2\u\3

Of course, you will want to manually check that someone's name SHOULDN'T start capitalized (some foreign names like duPont or vonTrapp, for example), but that can be left up for an exercise for the reader ;-)

-Steve

[Tom Humiston]

Here's the simplest approach I can think of: Write a pattern that matches the first three values and captures them via parentheses. Write a replacement pattern with \u in front of the first and third values:

(.*?,)(.*?,)(.*?,)

\u\1\2\u\3

If a value somehow has a comma within it or a line has fewer than three commas, that would throw things off. But given your sample data, those patterns work.

- TH

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