Title Case a Sentence, without using Arrays

[jm80ny]

So, I’ve been playing with Title Case a Sentence in Basic Algorithms and trying to resolve the challenge with out dumping the string into an array, or words, because… Maybe I can’t.

My premise is I would work out a function where it would look for a space, return the position, I’d increment that number by one, to find the next position, which should be the first letter of the first word.

A) I created a FOR loop where the counter started at zero and would run until it exceed the strings length .

for (var i = 0; i < str.length; i++) {

At each run of the loop it would test the position in the string to see if it was a space. If it tested true, then it would replace replace the character after the space with the same character in upper case.

I thought that if the IF statement was testing TRUE to a " ", then the first letter in the word would be: i + 1.

if (str[i] === " "){

  str = str.replace(str[i+1], str[i+1].toUpperCase);
}

I had two problems. The first was: str[i+1].toUpperCase. It hated that.

I decided I’d troubleshoot toUpperCase after, So in order to see if it was at least finding the correct position, I just tried to have the replace function take the index position after a space and turn it into an ‘X’.

str = str.replace(str[i+1], “X”);

This returned:

I’m X XiXtle tea Xot.

okay…? That was random, not what I expected. Thought I’d loose the +1 for a moment and just see if it was finding a space and turning it into an X

str = str.replace(str[i], “X”);

yields:

I’mXaXlittleXteaXpot.

Okay!! That works, but why does it fall apart with str[i+1]???

I realize I could spit this into an array and do that way, but this felt more fun/lazy/challenging. I’m at a meetup now and the guy next to me solved the problem with out using arrays, but did an approach without a loop.

I also realize, this wouldn’t handle the first character of the first word in a sentence, but that could be resolved with one line at the beginning of the function.

My first time using the forum, so I hope I explained myself correctly.

function titleCase(str) {

var i;
for (i=0; i<str.length; i++){
if (str[i] === " "){
str = str.replace(str[i+1], str[i+1].toUpperCase);
}
}
return str;
}

titleCase(“I’m a little tea pot”);

[jm80ny]

Thank You @P1xt

I want to understand this better. I realize this method is flawed as I now have to reconcile getting the other letters lower case (should have read closer). However, despite the problem, I still want to understand this better.

Thank you for the missing () on toUpperCase.

I revised my code to this:

function titleCase(str) {
str = str.replace(str[0], str[0].toUpperCase());
for (var i=0; i<str.length; i++){
if (str[i] === " "){
str = str.replace(str[i+1], str[i+1].toUpperCase());
} }
  return str;
}

and then ‘I’m a little tea pot’ returned this:

> I'm A liTtle tea Pot

I tried experimenting:

titleCase("abcdefghij klm n opqrs tu v wxyz");

This worked perfectly. Retuned:

`> Abcdefghij Klm N Opqrs Tu V Wxyz``

When i went to try other sentences and random combinations of letters, then it started upper casing random characters within the string. However, when I do a string, and the characters are in alphabetical order and parsed out with spaces, it works.

I don’t understand what sentences have to do with it. I’m using the replace function to replace a specific index point in the string with:

str[i+1] // the character after a space.

Either way, I’m going to use a very different approach for the solution as I now realize I have to get the other letters in words to be lower case.

Back to arrays.

but if