Uppercase First Letter w/exceptions

Storm has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Would anyone know how to work with these names to
convert it to Caps where needed.

ST. JOHN
STEVEN MILLER
O'REILY #f.e. O'REILY to O'Reily

I know I can use s/(\w+)/\u\L$1/g; for the first 2, but
what about the O'REILY?

One of those days :) Thanks ahead of time...

Storm

Comment on Uppercase First Letter w/exceptions

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RE: Uppercase First Letter w/exceptions by merlyn (Sage) on Aug 09, 2000 at 23:11 UTC
There isn't any "rule" way to do this. For example, some people prefer MacArthur and some prefer Macarthur, so you'd need to go back to the sources to figure out the proper presentation. Having said that, your substitution does indeed make O'REILY into O'Reily. Is that what you want, or not? -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply]
Perhaps this? by gryng (Hermit) on Aug 09, 2000 at 23:01 UTC
Perhaps this would work? (warning un-tested): `s/([\w']+)/\u\L$1/g;` The idea is to put any characters that will cause an uppercase inside the brackets along with the \w (you could put in underscores and dashes too, if appropriate). G'Luck Gryn	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Uppercase First Letter w/exceptions by lhoward (Vicar) on Aug 09, 2000 at 23:13 UTC
You probably also want to account for names w/ mixed case but no non-letter delimiters in-between such as McDonald and MacFrugal.	[reply]
Re: Uppercase First Letter w/exceptions by TheOtherGuy (Sexton) on Aug 09, 2000 at 23:12 UTC
Maybe I am totally misunderstanding the question, but whay are you not using the uc() or lc() functions?	[reply]