[R] String manipulation---mixed case

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Damian Betebenner <damian.betebenner <at> bc.edu> writes:

: 
: Hello,
: 
: Does anyone know of a "slick" way to get R to convert a string which is all 
upper case to a string where the first
: letter in each word is upper case and all others are lower case?  
: 
: I suspect the solution is to begin by parsing the string, convert the 
appropriate letters to upper and lower
: case using "toupper" and "tolower", and then to paste the pieces back 
together. Moreover, given the
: elegance and power of R, I'll bet this can be coded very tersely. Before I 
embarked on trying to code this, I
: thought I would tap the R braintrust to see if this has already been done.
: 

Assuming x contains your string (or a vector of such strings), try this.
The first iteration replaces each A not following a word boundary 
with a.  The second does the analogous operation with B, etc.

for(L in LETTERS) x <- gsub(paste("\\B", L, sep = ""), tolower(L), x)