and random guesses hasn't worked either

You obviously don't have enough monkeys.

But seriously, here what the documentation says about capitalisation.

d:\>perldoc -q capitalize
Found in D:\Perl\lib\pod\perlfaq4.pod
  How do I capitalize all the words on one line?
    To make the first letter of each word upper case:

            $line =~ s/\b(\w)/\U$1/g;
[download]

There's also good information at perldoc -f boundary, which might help clarify your thinking about what constitutes a word boundary.

Ahh, brilliant, thanks very much, have plenty of monkeys, but seeing as they failed will now have to go and spank them. much appreciated!

First of all, it helps to have some decent code to test with; several inputs, and your various solutions for converting them.

foreach my $string (
    'i am the very model of a modern major-general.',
    'this is one sentence.  this is two.',
    'foo bar',
    'outside parens (inside them)',
    'outside brackets [inside them], now braces {inside}',
) {
    (my $two_capture = $string) =~ s/ (^|[-\s(])  (\w) / $1 . uc $2 /e
+gx;
    (my $boundary    = $string) =~ s/ \b          (\w) /      uc $1 /e
+gx;
    (my $alternation = $string) =~ s/ (-|\s|^|\() (. ) / $1 . uc $2 /e
+gx;

    print(
        "string:      $string\n",
        "two_capture: $two_capture\n",
        "boundary:    $boundary\n",   
        "alternation: $alternation\n",
        "\n"
    );
}
[download]

While it's good you defined what you consider a word, it's probably a little too narrow. Consider the bracket and brace examples, and the ease of simply using \b, rather than defining every character you consider a word delimiter. Also, (.) is probably wrong; you want word characters you can upcase (\w), not just any character.

Anyways, as the code shows, your attempts work just fine. What problem did you encounter when you tested them that made you think they didn't?

The problem with your regex is that if the open paren is preceded by a space, the your regex will match ' (' and attempt to upper the left paren. Having matched those two characters successfully, the next match attempt starts with the first character following the paren, and so will skip the <paren><lowercase> pairing.

One way to fix this is to make sure that the ' (' doesn't match ' (', by only matching where the second character is a lowercase char.

s/(-| |^|\()([a-z])/$1\u$2/g;
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Perhaps a better way would be to use \b to detect the start of words.

s/(\b[a-z])/\u$1/g;
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This is slightly different in that anylowercase character preceded by a non-word char will be uppered. This may or may not fit your definition of a word.

s/\b(.)/\u$1/g;
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cool, thanks a lot!

Your second piece of code   s/(-| |^|\()(.)/$1\u$2/g;   worked perfectly when I tested it. What kind of error are you encountering?

Cheers, Sören

Hmm okay, could be activestate's wperl interpretation going off then, thanks for checking that for me though!
No specific error, just doesn't catch, will try a '\b' work around methinks!

Here'S An Example Which Isn'T Proper Form, But \B Wouldn'T'Ve Prevented

Also, if you're trying to perform capitalization for captions or titles, please remember that the English rules are more complex than just capitalizing every word. These vary between different prominent style guides, but this is the basic definition:

First and Last words are always capitalized. Other words are NOT capitalized if they're not "important." A good guide for non-important words are articles, conjunctions and prepositions.

This code is something I use on my own site. It's not particularly efficient or clever or even completely rigorous, but it makes most titles look right.

sub titlecase
{
    my @P = qw(a an the and or nor
           of with under over from for behind on in beside at to withi
+n
           de del la las los);
    my $name = shift;
    my @words = split /[._ ]/, $name;
    my $particles = join('|', @P);
    foreach (@words) { $_ = ucfirst($_) if not /^($particles)$/i }
    $words[0] = ucfirst($words[0]);
    $words[-1] = ucfirst($words[-1]);
    return join(' ', @words);
}
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• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Of Mice and Men
• For Whom the Bell Tolls
• Histoire de St. Louis, Roi de France
• Crossing Over

Of course, it leads you back to your original question: what is a word? My code would not handle 'Tis properly, nor parentheses.