First Letter Upper Case

[sde]

I made this function to set the first character of each word in a string to upper case.

When i use it, it returns an empty string.

Anything obvious I'm doing wrong here?

  public static String ucFirst(String strText)
  {
    if(strText.length() == 0)
      return strText;
    
    strText = strText.toLowerCase();
    String[] array;
    
    if( strText.indexOf(" ") < 0 )
    {
      array = new String[] { strText };
    }
    else
    {
      array = strText.split("[ ]");
    }

    String strOut = "";
    
    for(int i=0;i>array.length;i++)
    {
      char[] word = array[i].toCharArray();
      word[0] = Character.toUpperCase(word[0]);
      array[i] = word.toString();
      
      strOut += " " + array[i];
    }
    
    return strOut.trim();
  }

[Belisarius]

Would never be able to tell you came to Java from C . . .

The main problem is your for loop is wrong. You're checking to see it i > array.length, when it should be i < array.length.

Anyways, use StringTokenizer to do this, it'll save you a lot of work.
And don't use += with Strings, use StringBuffer. String concatination is very inefficent. Try concating a million strings together, then try it with StringBuffer, and you'll notice a big difference.

[sde]

omg!! i coded all day without a lunch,.. even still i can't believe i overlooked that!

that's funny you bring up the string concatination bit.

i made a display class for some things like printing tables from a customer array, .. however, i was using += to concat the string and after about a thousand records or so, it was entirely too slow.

so i ended up coding everything directly into the jsp page, and using out.println instead of making a big string.

i'll be looking into the stringTokenizer.. thanks a lot!

[Belisarius]

Here's how I would do it:

public static String ucFirst(String strText){
  if(strText == null || strText.length() == 0){
    return "";
  }

  StringTokenizer toks = new StringTokenizer(strText);
  StringBuffer output = new StringBuffer();
  while(toks.hasMoreTokens()){
    String word = toks.nextToken();
    output.append(word.substring(0,1).toUpperCase());
    if(word.length() > 1){
      output.append(word.substring(1).toLowerCase());
    }
    output.append(" ");
  }

  return output.toString();
}

Hopefully you're not worried about instances where you might want a capitalize letter in the middle of the word, like DuPont.

[sde]

cool thanks a lot!

basically, all names and addresses in our db2 database are capitolized. the purpose of this is just to make things a little easier to read on the computer in a web application.

i'll just be using it for names and address'

i will have to apollogize to teh DuPon and DaVincis' of the world. lol

[Belisarius]

BTW, I've been coding in shell script all day. I really love Java, so feel free to ask for advice on any code snippets you might have, it'd be a pleasant diversion.

[sde]

eh great thanks! i'm coded out .. and i have the rest of the week off .. i gotta program some php though for my side business.

thanks again for all the help, .. i'm sure i'll keep coming up with lots more next week.

[sde]

ok, and it's back to work here. just wanted to thank you for that fuction. it works perfectly.

i tried my old one and it was creating all sorts of weird characters.

StringTokenizer is nice =) Thanks!