Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:24:06 -0700 From: Gary Kline <kline@thought.org> To: bf1783@gmail.com Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: shell script to cap first letter? Message-ID: <20100321202406.GB92695@thought.org> In-Reply-To: <d873d5be1003210716l833bf5l6fd7f8c8aa85a028@mail.gmail.com> References: <d873d5be1003210716l833bf5l6fd7f8c8aa85a028@mail.gmail.com>
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On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 10:16:22AM -0400, b. f. wrote: > >i'm wondering if there is a script that i could run my plaintext > >files thru that would capitalize thef first letter of each > >sentence [[ assuming the character wasn't already a cap!]] > > > >more and more, in recent years, i have posted questions or > >written things that have been sloppily or casually hacked > >together in all lower case. this filter would have to determine > >what was and was not a sentence. or a sentence fragment. > >[ai]spell can catch "i've" and suggest "I've", etc. > > You're asking a lot from a simple filter if you want it to > discriminate between uses of "." to terminate a sentence, and other > uses of "." that do not require the following word to be capitalized, > such as the use of "." in abbreviations -- a lot of fairly > sophisticated spelling and grammar checkers can fail to do this > reliably. But if you want a naive filter you could use textproc/gsed, > with the /U GNU extension (our BSD sed(1) doesn't understand it), > e.g.: > > gsed -e 's|\(\.[.[:space:].]\)\([a-z]\)|\1\U\2|g' > > or you could use BSD sed(1), together with a more cumbersome > capitalization script, like the cflword[12345].sed scripts at: > > http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/scripts/#txfo > > Or you could use Perl. Or awk(1). Or script a [non-]interactive call > to a more sophisticated spelling or grammar checker. Or roll your own. > For questions like this, try searching the web first. > > b. given the sheer i.q. power ofthis list, i almost always ask here first rather thsan hunting for something this obscure. thanks for the url, tho. i'm pretty sure than *someone* has hacked every imagineable function in at least this universe. too bad that there are no web sites that have a library of them. gary -- Gary Kline kline@thought.org http://www.thought.org Public Service Unix http://jottings.thought.org http://transfinite.thought.org The 7.79a release of Jottings: http://jottings.thought.org/index.php
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