Capitalize first letter after special characters

Question

I want to remove extra spaces, add spaces if required and capitalize first letter of each word after special character using R

string <- "apple,banana, cat, doll and donkey;     fish,goat"

I want output as

Apple, Banana, Cat, Doll and donkey; Fish, Goat

I tried

gsub("(^.|,.|;.)", "\\U\\1", string, perl=T, useBytes = F)

It didn't work. Please help

you need to allow for whitespace gsub("(^.|[,;]\\s*.)", "\\U\\1", string, perl=TRUE) — rawr
– rawr, Commented Dec 7, 2015 at 14:21

Wiktor Stribiżew · Accepted Answer · 2015-12-07 14:28:40Z

You can use

string <- "apple,banana, cat, doll and donkey;     fish,goat"
trimws(gsub("(^|\\p{P})\\s*(.)", "\\1 \\U\\2", string, perl=T))
## => [1] "Apple, Banana, Cat, Doll and donkey; Fish, Goat"

See this IDEONE demo

The PCRE regex matches:

(^|\\p{P}) - (Group 1) start of string or any punctuation
\\s* - 0 or more whitespace symbols
(.) - (Group 2) any character but a newline

The replacement:

\\1 - backreferences Group 1
- inserts a space between the punctuation and the next character or at the start of string
\\U\\2 - turns the Group 2 character uppercase

And trimws removes the initial space we added with the regex.

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