AWK: convert messy record to Title Case

Question

I have a pipe delimited file with the following syntax:

|ID Number|First Name|Middle Name|Last Name|#, Street, City|etc..

Some records are messy and I would like to have the strings be converted into title case. Based on other questions regarding converting the strings to title case, I've found this command:

awk  'BEGIN { FS=OFS="|" } {for (i=1; i<=NF; ++i) { $i=toupper(substr($i,1,1)) tolower(substr($i,2)); } print }'

I would like to have every thing inside each field to be title-cased, not just the first letter of each field.

If possible, I would like to have an awk only solution for this.

It would be useful if you shared some sample input and desired output. Please [edit] your question to add some. By the way, are you using GNU awk? — Tom Fenech, Mar 23 '17 at 10:11
if Python an option? there is a string method https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.title — Sundeep, Mar 23 '17 at 10:51
@Sundeep: The `sed` solution is great, but note that it requires _GNU_ `sed`. — mklement0, Mar 23 '17 at 11:15

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 23 '17 at 11:09

3

Try something like this:

awk  'BEGIN { FS=OFS="\0" }
      {n = split($0, words, /[ |]/, separators);
       out = separators[0];
       for (i=1; i<=n; ++i) {
           out = out toupper(substr(words[i],1,1)) tolower(substr(words[i],2)) separators[i];
       };
       print out separators[n+1]; }' file

answered Mar 23 '17 at 11:09

Michael Vehrs

3,293
11
10

Great! Worked as desired. I knew I had to separate the delimiters from the words somehow, but I didn't think to do it this way. Thank you. – Rey Leonard Amorato Mar 24 '17 at 03:07

AWK: convert messy record to Title Case

1 Answers1