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I've got a vector of (human) names, all in capitals:
names <- c("FRIEDRICH SCHILLER", "FRANK O'HARA", "HANS-CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN")
To decapitalize (capitalize the first letters only) so far, I was using
simpleDecap <- function(x) {
s <- strsplit(x, " ")[[1]]
paste0(substring(s, 1,1), tolower(substring(s, 2)), collapse=" ")
}
sapply(names, simpleDecap, USE.NAMES=FALSE)
# [1] "Friedrich Schiller" "Frank O'hara" "Hans-christian Andersen"
But I also want to account for for ' and -. Using s <- strsplit(x, " |\\'|\\-")[[1]] of course finds the right letters, but then in the collapse ' and - get lost. Hence, I tried
simpleDecap2 <- function(x) {
for (char in c(" ", "\\-", "\\'")){
s <- strsplit(x, char)[[1]]
x <-paste0(substring(s, 1,1), tolower(substring(s, 2)), collapse=char)
} return x
}
sapply(names, simpleDecap, USE.NAMES=FALSE)
but that's even worse, of course, as the results are split one after the other:
sapply(names, simpleDecap2, USE.NAMES=FALSE)
# [1] "Friedrich schiller" "Frank o'Hara" "Hans-christian andersen"
I think the right approach splits according s <- strsplit(x, " |\\'|\\-")[[1]], but the paste= is the problem.
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Always capitalize the names of people and animals. Capitalize all parts of a name. Some surnames (last names) have unusual capitalization because of their original meaning. Names with more than one part can vary as families change spelling to make it simpler.
In modern times, Italian da, de, del, della, di, and d' are usually capitalized and used with the last name alone.
There are cultures where the surname occurs before the given name . Wikipedia refers to them as Western name order vs Eastern name order. If you have a list of names in both Western name order and Eastern name order, all caps are used to disambiguate the surname.
This seems to work, using Perl compatible regular expressions:
gsub("\\b(\\w)([\\w]+)", "\\1\\L\\2", names, perl = TRUE)
\L transforms the following match group to lower case.
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