What is the most elegant way to convert a hyphen separated word (e.g. “do-some-stuff”) to the lower camel-case variation (e.g. “doSomeStuff”)?

Question

What is the most elegant way to convert a hyphen separated word (e.g. \"do-some-stuff\") to the lower camel-case variation (e.g. \"doSomeStuff\") in Java?

Answer 1

Here is a slight variation of Andreas' answer that does more than the OP asked for:

public static String toJavaMethodName(final String nonJavaMethodName){
    final StringBuilder nameBuilder = new StringBuilder();
    boolean capitalizeNextChar = false;
    boolean first = true;

    for(int i = 0; i < nonJavaMethodName.length(); i++){
        final char c = nonJavaMethodName.charAt(i);
        if(!Character.isLetterOrDigit(c)){
            if(!first){
                capitalizeNextChar = true;
            }
        } else{
            nameBuilder.append(capitalizeNextChar
                ? Character.toUpperCase(c)
                : Character.toLowerCase(c));
            capitalizeNextChar = false;
            first = false;
        }
    }
    return nameBuilder.toString();
}

It handles a few special cases:

• fUnnY-cASe is converted to funnyCase
• --dash-before-and--after- is converted to dashBeforeAndAfter
• some.other$funky:chars? is converted to someOtherFunkyChars