Regex for capitalizing first letter in a tag, alt=", etc

Question

I've found regular expressions that capitalize the first letter in a sentence. But does anyone know a regex that capitalizes the first letter inside a tag, including URL and image attributes (e.g. title="antelope" or alt="antelope").

I used another regex to change all my image paths to lower case, and it zapped a bunch of my tags as well (alt, title, h2, etc.). So now I'd like to get a head start fixing them by capitalizing the first letters.

I'm working on a Mac, using Dreamweaver and TextWrangler as my text editors.

Before...

alt="antelope" title="antelope" <h2>antelope

After...

alt="Antelope" title="Antelope" <h2>Antelope

Give a before and after example. – ooga Apr 12 '14 at 22:19 — ooga, Apr 12 '14 at 22:19
See my edited post above; thx. – David Blomstrom Apr 12 '14 at 22:23 — David Blomstrom, Apr 12 '14 at 22:23

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 12 '14 at 22:36

0

Regex

(="\w|>\w)

Replace Regex

\U$1\E

Description: This will work for your example, depending on the regex engine you are using.

Regular expression visualization

Debuggex Demo

answered Apr 12 '14 at 22:36

abc123

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@aliteralmind `\E` stops the uppercasing. Since the only thing in the group will be symbols `\U` doesn't do anything to them...`\u` requires me to break my regex into many many more groups. – abc123 Apr 12 '14 at 22:42
Hmmmm...None of the above regexes are working for me in Dreamweaver or TextWrangler. Maybe I just need a third text editor. ;) I think Notepad uses a different regex engine. (I'm on a Mac, though.) I'll check out the StackOverflow Regex FAQ. – David Blomstrom Apr 12 '14 at 22:54

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:13

This replaces the value in parameters in a url. NOT in html, as I now see that is what you mean. Oh well.

Find what: (\?|\&)([a-z_]+=)([a-z])([^&]+)
Replace (all) with: $1$2\u$3$4

Free spaced:

(\?|\&)

Capture group 1: Either the literal question mark or ampersand.

([a-z_]+=)

Capture group 2: One or more of any lowercase letter or underscore, followed by the equals sign.

([a-z])

Capture group 3: The first letter in the value of the url parameter. Note this does not even notice parameters whose values don't start with a letter.

([^&]+)

Capture group four: Every other character in the value. Or more specifically, one or more of any character as long as it's not an ampersand. This is a negative character class.

The \u in the replace-with is an option in TextWrangler (and in TextPad, which is what I use...so TextWrangler might also use the Boost regex engine) replacement that uppercases the immediately-following character. I'm not sure if this would work if capture groups 3 and 4 were merged.

Try it (although it doesn't have the \u option.)

Please consider bookmarking the Stack Overflow Regular Expressions FAQ for future reference. There's a lot of helpful information in it, including a list of online regex testers (in the bottom section), so you can try things out yourself. All the links in this answer come from the FAQ.

Regex for capitalizing first letter in a tag, alt=", etc

2 Answers2

Regex

Replace Regex