Question

I need a function that will take a string and “pascal case” it. The only indicator that a new word starts is an underscore. Here are some example strings that need to be cleaned up:

1. price_old => Should be PriceOld
2. rank_old => Should be RankOld

I started working on a function that makes the first character upper case:

public string FirstCharacterUpper(string value)
{
 if (value == null || value.Length == 0)
  return string.Empty;
 if (value.Length == 1)
  return value.ToUpper();
 var firstChar = value.Substring(0, 1).ToUpper();
 return firstChar + value.Substring(1, value.Length - 1);
}

The thing the above function doesn’t do is remove the underscore and “ToUpper” the character to the right of the underscore.

Also, any ideas about how to pascal case a string that doesn’t have any indicators (like the underscore). For example:

1. companysource
2. financialtrend
3. accountingchangetype

The major challenge here is determining where one word ends and another starts. I guess I would need some sort of lookup dictionary to determine where new words start? Are there libraries our there to do this sort of thing already?

Thanks,

Paul

Answer 1

You can use the TextInfo.ToTitleCase method then remove the ‘_’ characters.

So, using the extension methods I’ve got:

http://theburningmonk.com/2010/08/dotnet-tips-string-totitlecase-extension-methods

you can do somethingl ike this:

var s = "price_old";
s.ToTitleCase().Replace("_", string.Empty);