Capitalize the first letter after a punctuation

Question

For example, I have this sentence:

hello. my name is Jess. what is your name?

and I want to change it into:

Hello. My name is Jess. What is your name?

I came up with this code, but I have one problem with connecting everything back together

def main():
    name = input('Enter your sentence: ')
    name = name.split('. ')
    for item in name:
        print (item[0].upper() + item[1:], end='. ')

When I put in the sentence, it will return:

Hello. My name is Jess. What is your name?.

How can I stop the punctuation from appearing at the end of the sentence? Also, what if I have a question in the middle, for example:

hi. what is your name? my name is Jess.

score 8 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 27 '18 at 12:07

8

This one is better solution

x = "hello. my name is Jess. what is your name?"
print( '. '.join(map(lambda s: s.strip().capitalize(), x.split('.'))))

output:
Hello. My name is jess. What is your name?

answered Apr 27 '18 at 12:07

Ramesh K

282
4
13

It makes the name `Jess` become lowercase. OP requested output be `Hello. My name is Jess. What is your name?` – Wayne Dec 22 '20 at 23:12

Leo · Answer 2 · 2015-02-20T23:16:26.723

2

You can construct your string first, following the same procedure, and the showing the string, except the last two values (you also need to remove the last space):

def main():
    result = ""
    name = input('Enter your sentence: ')
    name = name.split('. ')
    for item in name:
        result += item[0].upper() + item[1:] + '. '
    print result[:-2]

edited Feb 20 '15 at 23:16

answered Feb 20 '15 at 23:01

Leo

1,174
11
25

or even better combine this with @AdamHughes answer – Joran Beasley Feb 20 '15 at 23:02
I don't know why when I did it like that, there's an Invalid syntax exception raised, specifically at the end=' .' part – hn_03 Feb 20 '15 at 23:10
Importantly, this solution doesn't make proper names internal to the sentences lowercase. A more general solution for all typical end-of-sentence punctuation can be found at https://stackoverflow.com/a/63192453/8508004 . – Wayne Dec 23 '20 at 00:10

score 2 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:52

As an alternative (and may be as an over complication also), you can use nltk's Sentence Segmentation. Relying on @J.F. Sebastian's answer:

>>> import nltk.data
>>> 
>>> sent_tokenizer = nltk.data.load('tokenizers/punkt/english.pickle')
>>> 
>>> text = "hello. my name is Jess. what is your name?"
>>> 
>>> sentences = sent_tokenizer.tokenize(text)
>>> sentences = [sent.capitalize() for sent in sentences]
>>> print(' '.join(sentences))
Hello. My name is jess. What is your name?

Why it is not as simple as splitting a string by .? Generally speaking, the problem with . is that it is not only serving as a sentence delimiter. It also can be a part of an acronym or mark abbreviations inside a sentence (think also about all of the Mr., Mrs., Dr. etc):

Sentence segmentation is difficult because period is used to mark abbreviations, and some periods simultaneously mark an abbreviation and terminate a sentence, as often happens with acronyms like U.S.A.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 20 '15 at 23:00

0

Am I overlooking the obvious or can you just right strip?

Ie before you output your string:

finalstring = string.rstrip('.')

answered Feb 20 '15 at 23:00

Adam Hughes

14,601
12
83
122

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 08 '18 at 14:59

I have written a solution to similar question, you can read how the following codes works here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/48688182/5265414

   original_data = raw_input("Enter text: ")
    list = original_data.split(".")
    if original_data.endswith('.'):
        list.remove('')

    for w in list:
        stripper= w.strip().capitalize() +"."
        print stripper,

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 23 '23 at 14:01

0

I have recently come across this string.capsword and found it useful.

import string
sentence = 'hello. my name is Jess. what is your name?' 
string.capsword(sentence, sep='. ')  # sep should be a dot and space

answered Aug 23 '23 at 14:01

John Prawyn

1,423
3
19
28

Capitalize the first letter after a punctuation

6 Answers6

Linked