Does anyone have a good Proper Case algorithm

Question

Does anyone have a trusted Proper Case or PCase algorithm (similar to a UCase or Upper)? I\'m looking for something that takes a value such as \"GEORGE BURDELL\"

Answer 1

A lot of good answers here. Mine is pretty simple and only takes into account the names we have in our organization. You can expand it as you wish. This is not a perfect solution and will change vancouver to VanCouver, which is wrong. So tweak it if you use it.

Here was my solution in C#. This hard-codes the names into the program but with a little work you could keep a text file outside of the program and read in the name exceptions (i.e. Van, Mc, Mac) and loop through them.

public static String toProperName(String name)
{
    if (name != null)
    {
        if (name.Length >= 2 && name.ToLower().Substring(0, 2) == "mc")  // Changes mcdonald to "McDonald"
            return "Mc" + Regex.Replace(name.ToLower().Substring(2), @"\b[a-z]", m => m.Value.ToUpper());

        if (name.Length >= 3 && name.ToLower().Substring(0, 3) == "van")  // Changes vanwinkle to "VanWinkle"
            return "Van" + Regex.Replace(name.ToLower().Substring(3), @"\b[a-z]", m => m.Value.ToUpper());

        return Regex.Replace(name.ToLower(), @"\b[a-z]", m => m.Value.ToUpper());  // Changes to title case but also fixes 
                                                                                   // appostrophes like O'HARE or o'hare to O'Hare
    }

    return "";
}