Find all non-alpha characters in string (excluding special alpha chars) and capitalise each word before/after the character

Question

I'm looking to capitalise each part of a string that precedes/follows a special character and found this post which does the trick nicely. Only problem is it also sees characters which are special alpha characters (eg ô, ê, ë...) as part of the check. How do I get this to ignore those, or rather see them as acceptable alpha characters?

public static String capitaliseString(String word) {
   String name = '';
   Matcher m = Pattern.compile('(\\w+|\\W+)').matcher(word);
   while (m.find())
     name += m.group().toLowerCase().capitalize();
   system.debug('####util_helper capitaliseString: ' + word + ' ## ' + name);
   return name;
}

For example, if I pass it a string like o'hägen-daß I need it to return O'Hägen-Daß, but instead it returns O'HÄGen-Daß as it sees the ä as a special character.

Answer 1

\w is the shortcut character class for ascii word characters; a-z, A-Z, _, 0-9

You'll need a more extensive character class.

From this question on StackOverflow, it appears that Java allows positive and negative matching on larger unicode categories and blocks using \p{<identifier>} (positive match) and \P{<identifier>} (negative match).

The difference being what you might expect. Lower case 'p' = do a positive match, upper case 'P' = do a negative match.

Since Apex compiles to Java bytecode, figured it was worth a shot. Turns out that we do have the ability to use these (we just need to change the one backslash to two, as usual).

Simply replacing your regex '(\\w+|\\W+)' with one that does the same, but for all unicode (not just Latin++) characters (\\p{L}+|\\P{L}+) seems to return the result you want.

That could likely be narrowed down a bit.

Answer 2

I think this will be helpful.

public static String toProperCase(String request){
    List<String> responseList = new List<String>();
    request = request.toLowerCase().normalizeSpace(); // To convert to lower case and remove unwanted spaces within string
    List<String> requestList = request.splitByCharacterType(); // Split the string at different character type
    for(String word : requestList){
        responseList.add(word.capitalize()); // Capitalize first character of each split word
    }
    return String.join(responseList, '');
}