Notepad++ Capitalize Every First Letter of Every Word

Question

Input: "notepad++ capitalize every first letter of every word"

Output: "Notepad++ Capitalize Every First Letter Of Every Word"

I have been attempting to capitalize the first letter of every word using ctr+F and regex.

So far I have been attempting to use find:\b(.) or \<(.) with replace:\u\1 but this results in all of my letters being capitalized.

I have made due with ^(.) & \u\1 followed by \s\b(.) & \u\1.

However, this seems silly to me as there are many posts talking about using the start of word boundaries. I am just having difficulty making them work. Thanks for your consideration!

There is no way to do that in N++ unless you use some third party plugin. Nor with regex — Jorge Campos, Aug 11 '15 at 21:37

Wiktor Stribiżew · Accepted Answer · 2020-05-30T10:00:56.387

Background

According to Notepad++ specification (see Substitutions section), there are three operators that can be useful when turning substrings uppercase:

\u
Causes next character to output in uppercase
\U
Causes next characters to be output in uppercase, until a \E is found.
\E
Puts an end to forced case mode initiated by \L or \U.

Thus, you can either match a substring and turn its first character uppercase with \u to capitalize it, or match a character and use \U/\E.

Note that Unicode characters won't be turned uppercase, only ASCII letters are affected.

BOW (Beginning of Word) Bug in Notepad++

Note that currently (in Notepad++ v.6.8.8) the beginning of word does not work for some reason. A common solution that works with most engines (use it in Sublime Text and it will match) does not work:

\b(\w)

This regex matches all word characters irrespective of their position in the string.

I logged a bug Word boundary issue with a generic subpattern next to it #1404.

Solution #1 (for the current Notepad++ v.6.8.8)

The first solution can be using the \w+ and replace with \u$0 (no need using any capturing groups). Though this does not mean we only match the characters at the beginning of a word, the pattern will just match chunks of word characters ([a-zA-Z0-9_] + all Unicode letters/digits) and will turn the first character uppercase.

Solution #2 (for the current Notepad++ v.6.8.8)

The second solution can be implemented with special boundaries defined with lookbehinds:

(?:(?<=^)|(?<=\W))\w

And replace with \U$0\E.

The regex (?:(?<=^)|(?<=\W))\w matches an alphanumeric only at the beginning of a line ((?<=^)) or after a non-word character ((?<=\W)).

The replacement - \U$0\E - contains a \U flag that starts turning letters uppercase and \E is a flag that tells Notepad++ to stop converting case.

Edge case

In case you have hyphenated words, like well-known, and you only want the first part to be capitalized, you can use [\w-]+ with \u$0 replacement. It will also keep strings like -v or --help intact.

If I could only upvote this over 200 times (The number of items that I needed to convert). Saved me hours of editing. Thanks! — jmcg, Oct 27 '15 at 03:57
Just FYI: This only works with ASCII letters, Cyrillic etc. letters cannot be changed using the case swapping operators in Notepad++. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Sep 23 '21 at 11:31

score 26 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 01 '16 at 21:11

26

A simpler regex that worked for me:

Find: (\w+)

Replace: \u$0

answered Jan 01 '16 at 21:11

Elson Barbosa

261
3
2

score 12 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 22 '17 at 15:10

12

There is a shortcut available in Notepad++ v7.3.2 to capitalize every first letter of every word.

ALT + U

Not sure about prior versions.

answered Feb 22 '17 at 15:10

Rajesh

2,135
1
12
14

1

It seems to work for selected text only. Also, `Ctrl+Alt+U` changes the selected text to sentence case. – Wiktor Stribiżew Apr 06 '17 at 08:59
1

Worked perfectly. Thanks, brother. And `CTRL+U` do the exact opposite. `i-e changes "InitCap" to "initcap"` – meyasir Jun 24 '18 at 20:41

score 6 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 11 '19 at 12:32

6

Uppercase The First Letter Of Every Word: Use the shortcut: Alt + U

lowercase the first letter of every word: Use the shortcut: Clt + U

Shortcut working in version 7.6.3

answered Jun 11 '19 at 12:32

ajaykc86

61
1
2

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 13 '17 at 14:14

I have achieved something similar by recording a macro that uses the following replacement.

Find what:    ([a-z])+
Replace with: \u$0\E

Tick 'In selection'

This is the resulting macro that I extracted from C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++\shortcuts.xml.

<Macro name="Title Case" Ctrl="no" Alt="no" Shift="no" Key="0">
    <Action type="3" message="1700" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" />
    <Action type="3" message="1601" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="([A-Z])" />
    <Action type="3" message="1625" wParam="0" lParam="2" sParam="" />
    <Action type="3" message="1602" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="\L$0" />
    <Action type="3" message="1702" wParam="0" lParam="898" sParam="" />
    <Action type="3" message="1701" wParam="0" lParam="1609" sParam="" />
    <Action type="3" message="1700" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="" />
    <Action type="3" message="1601" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="([a-z])+" />
    <Action type="3" message="1625" wParam="0" lParam="2" sParam="" />
    <Action type="3" message="1602" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="\u$0\E" />
    <Action type="3" message="1702" wParam="0" lParam="898" sParam="" />
    <Action type="3" message="1701" wParam="0" lParam="1609" sParam="" />
</Macro>

Extra: you can add this to your right-click context menu (contextMenu.xml) using:

<Item MenuEntryName="Macro" MenuItemName="Title Case" />

Notepad++ Capitalize Every First Letter of Every Word

5 Answers5

Background

BOW (Beginning of Word) Bug in Notepad++

Solution #1 (for the current Notepad++ v.6.8.8)

Solution #2 (for the current Notepad++ v.6.8.8)

Linked