Change the case of any text

Ten cases, one example

The first four change letters only: spaces, punctuation and line breaks stay where they were. The other six build names, so they drop the spaces and punctuation between words, which names in code cannot hold. They change each line separately, so a list of column headings becomes a list of names in one go, and they split words at spaces, at punctuation and at capitals already inside a word: firstName becomes first_name in snake_case.

Title case rules, and what Text Studio does

Style guides agree on capitalizing the first and last word of a title and every noun, verb, adjective and adverb. They differ on the small words. Chicago style lowercases articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions such as and, but and or, and prepositions of any length. AP style, for the titles of books, films and songs, capitalizes every word of four letters or more, so “With” and “From” go up. For news headlines, AP and many other publications use sentence case instead, and the style guides Google and Microsoft publish for technical writing both prefer sentence case for headings.

Text Studio's Title Case keeps to one simple rule: the first letter of every word becomes a capital, also after a hyphen or an opening bracket, and every other letter becomes small. “a tale of two cities” comes out as “A Tale Of Two Cities”, so lower the small words by hand to match your style. Capitals inside words do not survive either: NASA turns into Nasa and iPhone into Iphone. A quick read after converting catches them.

Rescuing text typed in capitals

An email typed with Caps Lock on, a heading that shouts, a list of names exported in capitals: Sentence case is the quick fix for running text. It makes everything small, then capitalizes the first letter of the text and the first letter after each full stop, question mark and exclamation mark. It cannot tell names from other words, so “WE MET ANNA IN PARIS” becomes “We met anna in paris”.

A lone “i” is a common leftover. Press Ctrl H, turn on Match case and Whole words, find i and replace it with I. Abbreviations such as i.e. match too, so step through with Replace rather than Replace all.

For a list of names in capitals, Title Case is the better pick, since it works line by line: ANNA SMITH becomes Anna Smith. Names with a capital in the middle, such as McDonald, still need a touch by hand.

Names for code and data

Each programming world has its habits. Python's style guide, PEP 8, asks for snake_case functions and variables, PascalCase classes and CONSTANT-style names for constants. JavaScript uses camelCase for variables and functions, CSS class names and many file names use kebab-case, and database columns are often snake_case.

To turn spreadsheet headings into column names, paste them one per line, select them and pick a case: “Date of birth” becomes date_of_birth and “Customer ID” becomes customer_id. These cases keep accented letters as they are, so café stays café. Choose Remove accents in Clean first when the names must be plain ASCII, or use url-slug, which strips them for you.

Abbreviations are split only where a small letter meets a capital. userID becomes user_id, but HTTPServer has no such spot and comes out as httpserver, so put a space in it first if you want http_server.