RDU Code Camp

TriNug put on an awesome codecamp over the weekend.  I presented programming the Kinect.  There was about 20 people in my session (more than I expected) and we had a great time going through some of the basic (and way cool) features of the Kinect API.  I hope to see some really neat projects at future TriNug events using the Kinect.

My side deck and code samples are on TriNug’s wiki found here.

Proper Casing Of Proper Names

I was consuming an external API that was returning people’s first names.  The problem was that the names were coming back all caps (eg: “GILLIGAN”).  I wanted to convert that into the proper case (eg: “Gillian”).  In the past, I would call ToLower() of the string and then take the first character of a substring and make it Upper().  To protect myself in case there was several words in the name(eg: MARY ANN), I would also need to split on any spaces and loop through the array doing my Upper/Lower functions.  The code would look something like this:

static void WrongWay(String name)
{
    String tempWord = String.Empty;
    String firstLetter = String.Empty;
    String restOfWord = String.Empty;
    StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();

    String[] splitName = name.Split(' ');
    foreach (String word in splitName)
    {
        tempWord = word.ToLower();
        firstLetter = tempWord.Substring(0, 1);
        firstLetter = firstLetter.ToUpper();
        restOfWord = tempWord.Substring(1, tempWord.Length-1);
        stringBuilder.Append(firstLetter);
        stringBuilder.Append(restOfWord);
    }
    Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Was = {0} Now = {1}", name, stringBuilder.ToString()));
}

And the output looks like this:

I hate this solution for a couple of reasons:

• It smells like Kludgy code
• It is Kludgy code
• It does not account for people with single letter names
• It does not account for internationalism and different languages that use different glyphs

I thought to myself – there must be a better way and since Microsoft has lots of smart people, they might have done something like this already.

My first stop was the String.ToLower() overload.  I pumped in the different cultures (Current and CurrentUI):

static void WriteNames(String name)
{
    CultureInfo currentCulture = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
    CultureInfo currentUICulture = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture;

    Console.WriteLine(String.Format("ToLower = {0}",name.ToLower()));
    Console.WriteLine(String.Format("ToUpperWithCurrentCulture = {0}", name.ToLower(currentCulture)));
    Console.WriteLine(String.Format("ToUpperWithCurrentUICulture = {0}", name.ToLower(currentUICulture)));
}

Alas, it did not work:

ToUpper() had the same (non) effect.

I then thought “Hey, maybe I should check MSDN or Stackoverflow”.  Sure enough, I ran into this page.  Without reading the entire page (who does that?)  I jammed in this line of code,

Console.WriteLine(String.Format("currentCulture.TextInfo.ToTitleCase using Upper = {0}", 
    currentCulture.TextInfo.ToTitleCase(name)));

but I got the same result:

I then went back and read the entire MSDN page.  I changed my code to this (note the ToLower())

Console.WriteLine(String.Format("currentCulture.TextInfo.ToTitleCase using Lower = {0}",
    currentCulture.TextInfo.ToTitleCase(name.ToLower())));

Sure enough:

Not only that, it works for multiple words:

Not only that, it handles middle initials!

Alas, it does not handle suffixes:

Still, that function gives you plenty out of the box.  I am very excited (OK, mildly excited) about this new find….