Question

I have a problem with RegExp not recognizing special characters as word characters (or worse – counting as \b):

"wäww, xöxx  yüyy zßzz".replace(/\b\w/g,function(m){return m.toUpperCase();})

should return

"Wäww, Xöxx  Yüyy Zßzz"

but unfortunately returns:

"WäWw, XöXx  YüYy ZßZz"

I played with several encodings but that didn’t help…

How can I make it recognize the characters or otherwise work around that problem?

^{There is a question with a similar problem with no satisfying answer.}

Answer 1

Cheat

Instead of trying to work around the nuances of unicode and js, just use the space as the marker for your replace/caplitalize logic:

> "wäww, xöxx  yüyy zßzz".replace(/( |^)[^ ]/g,function(m){return m.toUpperCase();});
"Wäww, Xöxx  Yüyy Zßzz"

OR

> "wäww, xöxx  yüyy zßzz".replace(/(\s|^)[^ ]/g,function(m){return m.toUpperCase();});
"Wäww, Xöxx  Yüyy Zßzz"

OR

> "wäww, xöxx  yüyy zßzz".replace(/([\s\.,:;]|^)[^ ]/g,function(m){return m.toUpperCase();});
"Wäww, Xöxx  Yüyy Zßzz"

This kind of technique will correctly capitalize accented chars:

> "wäww, öhyes".replace(/( |^)[^ ]/g,function(m){return m.toUpperCase();})
"Wäww, Öhyes"