Ruby:
Capitalizing a string

How to:

Ruby provides straightforward methods for string manipulation, including capitalization:

# Ruby's built-in method
string = "hello WORLD"
capitalized_string = string.capitalize
puts capitalized_string # => "Hello world"

Very handy.

Ruby’s .capitalize method is convenient but only upper-cases the first letter. For more control or to capitalize each word in a string (known as title case), you might want to use the titleize method from the Rails ActiveSupport extension, or implement it yourself:

# Using ActiveSupport's 'titleize' in Rails
require 'active_support/core_ext/string/inflections'
string = "hello world"
puts string.titleize # => "Hello World"

# A home-made solution
string = "hello world"
capitalized_each_word = string.split.map(&:capitalize).join(' ')
puts capitalized_each_word # => "Hello World"

This method splits the string into an array of words, capitalizes each one, then joins them back together with a space.

Personally, I take this idea much farther in my code. I wrote my own titleize method which accounts for small words like “a” and “the”.