Capitalize first character of each word of String in Java example

This Java example shows how to capitalize first character of each word of string or make first letter uppercase in Java. Example also shows how to capitalize first character of each word of String using various approaches.

How to capitalize first character of each word of String in Java?

To capitalize first character of each word of String, you can use one of the below given two approaches.

1) Using substring, toUpperCase and split methods of String class

You can use substring, split and toUpperCase methods of String class to capitalize first letter of each word of String as given below.

package com.javacodeexamples.stringexamples;

public class CapitalizeFirstCharEachWordExample {

public static void main(String[] args) {

String str = "this is a test to capitalize each word in string";

System.out.println(capitalizeEachWord(str));

}

private static String capitalizeEachWord(String str){

//if string is null or empty, return empty string

if(str == null || str.length() == 0)

return "";

* if string contains only one char,

* make it capital and return

if(str.length() == 1)

return str.toUpperCase();

* Split the string by space

String[] words = str.split(" ");

//create empty StringBuilder with same length as string

StringBuilder sbCapitalizedWords = new StringBuilder(str.length());

* For each word,

* 1. get first character using substring

* 2. Make it upper case and append to string builder

* 3. append the rest of the characters as-is to string builder

* 4. append space to string builder

for(String word : words){

if(word.length() > 1)

sbCapitalizedWords

.append(word.substring(0, 1).toUpperCase())

.append(word.substring(1));

else

sbCapitalizedWords.append(word.toUpperCase());

sbCapitalizedWords.append(" ");

}

* convert StringBuilder to string, also

* remove last space from it using trim method

return sbCapitalizedWords.toString().trim();

}

Output

1	This Is A Test To Capitalize Each Word In String

The above program worked for our sample string. Let’s try some other strings as well.

Inputs

I love Java.i also like c++,and c

i love programming:java programming

i like when someone says 'i love programming'

Outputs

I Love Java.i Also Like C++,and C

I Love Programming:java Programming

I Like When Someone Says 'i Love Programming'

As you can see from the output, our program only capitalized words which are separated by space. It ignores all other punctuation marks like comma (,), full stop (.), quotation marks (single quotes and double quotes), hyphen etc.

In order to include all these, we need to change our program a bit. We need to change the split method to split the string by words using regular expression. We will use \\W pattern which denotes word boundaries.

Here is the updated capitalizeEachWord method.

private static String capitalizeEachWord(String str){

//if string is null or empty, return empty string

if(str == null || str.length() == 0)

return "";

* if string contains only one char,

* make it capital and return

if(str.length() == 1)

return str.toUpperCase();

* Split the string by word boundaries

String[] words = str.split("\\W");

//create empty StringBuilder with same length as string

StringBuilder sbCapitalizedWords = new StringBuilder(str.length());

for(String word : words){

if(word.length() > 1)

sbCapitalizedWords

.append(word.substring(0, 1).toUpperCase())

.append(word.substring(1));

else

sbCapitalizedWords.append(word.toUpperCase());

//we do not want to go beyond string length

if(sbCapitalizedWords.length() < str.length()){

sbCapitalizedWords.append(str.charAt(sbCapitalizedWords.length()));

}

* convert StringBuilder to string, also

* remove last space from it using trim method, if there is any

return sbCapitalizedWords.toString().trim();

}

Inputs

I love Java.i also like c++,and c

i love programming:java programming

i like when someone says 'i love programming'

Outputs

I Love Java.I Also Like C++,And C

I Love Programming:Java Programming

I Like When Someone Says 'I Love Programming'

I have tested this solution with limited number of input strings and it worked as expected. It may need some minor tweaks in case if the above method does not work for any particular use case.

2) Capitalize first character of String using Apache Commons

If you don’t want to implement your own solution, you can always use ever reliable Apache Commons library. Use capitalize or capitalizeFully method of WordUtils class as given below.