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Asked: 2026-05-27T10:07:44+00:00

I would like to capitalize names properly, which in this case means: The first

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I would like to capitalize names properly, which in this case means:

  • The first letter is capitalized.
  • The first letter after a space is capitalized (‘Van Helsing’, not ‘Van helsing’)
  • The first letter after a dash is capitalized (‘Johnson-Smith’, not ‘Johnson-smith’)
  • No other letters are capitalized.

The first and last requirements are easily handled:

CONCAT(LEFT(name, 1), LOWER(RIGHT(name, LENGTH(name) - 1)))

The others are harder. I’ve written a 54-times-nested REPLACE statement (not by hand of course, I used Excel)

REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(...,' b',' B'),'-b','-B'),' a',' A'),'-a','-A')

but I feel like there must be a more elegant and maintainable solution. Any ideas?

If there’s a built-in function that is similar but not identical to my requirements that would probably be fine.

Edit: This script will only run on names that have lost their capitalization already, so there’s no danger in mis-handling obscure names. Handling apostrophes like spaces and dashes would be nice, though. A glance through the current data shows that many (~30%) of the names have at least one of [-‘ ].

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The code frustratedwithforms posted does not work correctly…it correctly capitalizes the first and last words in the string and deletes anything in between (if there are > 2). Someone posted a corrected version at the URL he posted…

    (See Matt Cavanaugh’s post on May 15 2009 3:52pm at: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/string-functions.html)

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