Capitalizing a sentence

Question

Is there a method (perhaps in some library from Rails) or an easy way that capitalizes the first letter of a string without affecting the upper/lower case status of the rest of the string? I want to use it to capitalize error messages. I expect something like this:

"hello iPad" #=> "Hello iPad"

Answer 1

There is a capitalize method in Ruby, but it will downcase the rest of the string. You can write your own otherwise:

class String
  def capitalize_first
    (slice(0) || '').upcase + (slice(1..-1) || '')
  end

  def capitalize_first!
    replace(capitalize_first)
  end
end

Edit: Added capitalize_first! variant.