Javascript/jQuery uppercase first letter of variable with accents

Question

I have a form with some text inputs to insert First Name, Last Name of a person, but I want to change the first letter of each word to a Uppercase and I found this solution:

 // The textboxes with this class are modified
 $(".toUpper").change(function () {
        var str = $(this).val();
        str = str.toLowerCase().replace(/\b[a-z]/g, function (letter) {
            return letter.toUpperCase();

        });
        $(this).val(str);
    });

and it works, ("hEllO"=>"Hello", "whAts uP" =>"Whats Up").

The problem occurs when I try to apply this to an accented word, Example:

"gonzález" = "GonzáLez",
"pérez" = "PéRez"

After an accented word there is a Uppercase letter again.

How can I modify the regular expression to avoid this issue?

hope you can help me!! :)

perhaps duplicate problem to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/196972/convert-string-to-title-case-with-javascript/196991#196991 ? — gillyspy, May 15 '13 at 19:20

Anirudha · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-15T19:30:42.783

3

\b is a non word boundary (i.e \b would make a boundary for any any character which doesn't belong to any 1 of [0-9a-zA-Z_])

So those accented word become the boundary for your word..

Instead use this regex

/(^|\s)[a-z\u00E0-\u00FC]/g

edited May 15 '13 at 19:30

answered May 15 '13 at 19:11

Anirudha

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Hi I tried this in Chrome Javascript console and it says: SyntaxError: Unexpected token ^ – CesarCarrillo May 15 '13 at 19:21
@Anirudh: You'll still have the same problem. `[a-z]` won't match accented characters, so `él` will not get capitalized. – Blender May 15 '13 at 19:26

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 15 '13 at 19:22

2

[a-z] doesn't match é. You'll have to be a bit more lenient:

"gonzález foo bar, baz él".replace(/(^|\s)\S/g, function(match) {
    return match.toUpperCase();
});

And the output:

"González Foo Bar, Baz Él"

answered May 15 '13 at 19:22

Blender

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I would suggest improvement, so it can handle string like "stRING": "gonzález foo bar, baz él".toLowerCase().replace(...) – ceruleus May 22 '14 at 06:59

Javascript/jQuery uppercase first letter of variable with accents

2 Answers2

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