Question

Something that’s been bugging me while working on a recent project; why doesn’t C# have a native function to change a string to title case?

e.g.

string x = "hello world! THiS IS a Test mESSAGE";
string y = x.ToTitle(); // y now has value of "Hello World! This Is A Test Message"

We have .ToLower and .ToUpper, and I appreciate you can use System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.TextInfo.ToTitleCase or create a TextInfo object (the same process), but it’s just so… ugly.

Anyone know the reason?

Answer 1

Actually it has: TextInfo.ToTitleCase

Why it is there? Because casing depends on current culture. E.g. Turkish cultures have different uppercase and lowercase for ‘i’ and ‘I’ characters. Read more about this here.

UPDATE: Actually I agree with @Cashley which says that missing ToTitleCase method on String class looks like an oversight of MicroSoft. If you will look on String.ToUpper() or String.ToLower() you will see that both use TextInfo internally:

public string ToUpper()
{
    return this.ToUpper(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture);
}

public string ToUpper(CultureInfo culture)
{
    if (culture == null)    
        throw new ArgumentNullException("culture");

    return culture.TextInfo.ToUpper(this);
}

So, I think there should be same method for ToTitleCase(). Maybe .NET team decided to add to String class only those methods, which are mostly used. I don’t see any other reason for keeping ToTitleCase away.