TIL: ucFirst() for Word Casing in Lucee CFML

Despite 10+ years of CFML programming, I'm still stumbling across new functions. Today, it was the awkwardly named but surprisingly handy ucFirst, a Lucee-specific function for dealing with string capitalization.

I'll just quote the docs, regarding what ucFirst does:

Transforms the first letter of a string to uppercase or the first letter of each word, and optionally lowercase uppercase characters.

Admittedly, that's a bit of a mishmash, with three different modes of functionality:

• Without any options, ucFirst transforms a string into "sentence case." That is, it ensures the first letter is capitalized. This is also the casing of proper nouns, like first and last names, which is what I needed - a bit more on that at the end.

  ucFirst( "the time has come.");
  // The time has come.
  
  ucFirst( "maggie");
  // Maggie

• You can convert a string to "title case" by setting the second argument, doAll, to true:

  ucFirst( "alice's adventures in wonderland", true );
  // Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

• The third optional argument is doLowerIfAllUppercase. Setting it to true only impacts the result if the entire string is uppercase:

  ucFirst( "I AM YELLING ONLINE!", false, true);
  // I am yelling online!
  
  ucFirst( "Frank McCourt", false, true );
    // Frank McCourt

Now, I'll be this first to admit that this is not mind-blowing stuff - but it's just what I was looking for.

I was trying to correct user-provided names that were, in many cases (pun-intended), improperly cased; e.g. BRENDA FLOR, rafael Kerr, and other variations. A little Googling to find a solution showed that this isn't an uncommon problem:

• Capitalize first letter of first word in a every sentence in ColdFusion (Stack Overflow)
• Capitalize the first letter? (Adobe Support Community)
• Capitalize the first letter in every word using ColdFusion - Regex to the rescue
• CapFirst() (CFLib.org)
• upperFirst() (CFLib.org)

As you can see, there are a range of solutions, with varying degrees of control, complexity, and accuracy. Your mileage will vary, depending on the ColdFusion engine that you're using and your application's requirements (Don't forget to account for Celtic names!)

If you're using Lucee, nothing beats ucFirst for simplicity, as it's built in. And while there's no guarantee that its output is 100% correct, in our particular use case, it was accurate enough:

newFirstName = ucFirst( firstName, true, true );
newLastName = ucFirst( lastName, true, true );

So, there you go - another tool that might come in handy, should the need arise.