Python Capitalize First Letter with Example Program

This article demonstrates how Python capitalize the first letter using program examples.

Capitalizing the first letter is vital and a common format for the reader’s convenience. However, before understanding these methods, let’s begin with a brief introduction to Python strings.

Strings are one of the most frequently used data structures in Python. Some of the Python strings are uppercase and lowercase. Hence, it could be a combination of the two.

Therefore, it is chaotic and tough to manually correct each string that is created and utilized throughout programming.

What is a string in python?

Strings in Python are an array of characters which are written in single, double, or triple quotes. This is the same as the meaning of the string in many other programming languages.

p= "Pythonforfree"
print(a)

Output

Pythonforfree

How to capitalize the first letter in python?

There are different ways to capitalize the first letter in python. Thus, we listed them below:

str.capitalize() python to capitalize first letter

The string.capitalize() function takes the string argument and returns the first letter of the capitalized word.

This is useful if you want to automatically format a lot of text in uppercase or change the file’s name or folder. Plus, string capitalize() works on any string containing English letters, numbers, and punctuation marks.

Example

sample = "pythonforfree"
print("Original string:")
print(sample)
print("After capitalizing first letter:")
print(sample.capitalize())

Output

Original string:
pythonforfree
After capitalizing first letter:
Pythonforfree

string slicing() and upper() method in python

The slicing technique extracts the string’s first letter, while the upper() method of a string converts it into uppercase. This allows you to access the first letter of every word in the string, including the spaces between words.

Example

sample = "python for free"
print("Original string:")
print(sample) 
result = sample[0].upper() + sample[1:]
print("After capitalizing first letter:")
print(result)

Output

Original string:
python for free
After capitalizing first letter:
Python for free

str.title() method in python

string.title() method is a very simple and straightforward method of generating titles for strings. The titles for strings have a default structure where the first letter is always in uppercase.

This method helps us capitalize the first letter of every word and change the others to lowercase, thus giving the desired output.

Example

sample = "python for free"
print("Original string:")
print(sample)
print("After capitalizing first letter:")
print(str.title(sample))

Output

Original string:
python for free
After capitalizing first letter:
Python For Free

python function to capitalize each word in a string

We use the split() method to split the given strings into words. The generator expressions iterate through the words, which convert the first letter of each word into upper case using the capitalize() function.

Example

sample = "python for free"
print("Original string:")
print(sample)
print("After capitalizing first letter:")
result = ' '.join(elem.capitalize() for elem in sample.split())
print(result)

Output

Original string:
python for free
After capitalizing first letter:
Python For Free

string.capwords() in python

capwords() is a Python function that converts the first letter of every word into uppercase and every other letter into lowercase. The function takes the string as the parameter value and then returns the string with the first letter capital.

Example

import string
sample = "python for free"
print("Original string:")
print(sample)
print("After capitalizing first letter:")
result = string.capwords(sample)
print(result)

Output

Original string:
python for free
After capitalizing first letter:
Python For Free

Regex python to capitalize the first letter

Regex in Python is a regular expression. It is a special sequence of characters that helps match or find the other strings. The Regex function allows searching for the starting character of each word and capitalizing it.

Using this method, you have to import the regex library using the “import” keyword before defining the main function.

Example

import re
def convert_into_uppercase(a):
    return a.group(1) + a.group(2).upper()
sample = "Python for free is great!"
result = re.sub("(^|\s)(\S)", convert_into_uppercase, sample)
print(result)

Output

Python For Free Is Great!

How to capitalize first letter of every word

When you have an entire list of words and expect to capitalize the first letter of every word…

Well, it is quite simple.

You can iterate through the words in the list using a for loop and then use the title() method in Python.

This process will help you convert the first letter of each word in the list to uppercase.

Example

language=['java','python','django']
print('Original List:')
print(language)
language = [i.title() for i in language]
print('List after capitalizing each word:')
print(language)

Output

Original List:
['java', 'python', 'django']
List after capitalizing each word:
['Java', 'Python', 'Django']

Conclusion

To sum up, string is a frequently used data structure in Python programming.

It is not practical to capitalize the first letter of each string word manually. Hence, we have presented various ways to convert the first letter in the string to uppercase.

All these functions illustrate the same output, and you can choose one according to your needs.

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