Notepad++ and XML - Replace and capitalize the first letter of all words in a tag element

Question

I have an XML file with the following structure:

<id>1</id>
<name>alligator and stingray</name>
...
<id>99999</id>
<name>dolphin with carp</name>

I need result:

<id>1</id>
<name>Alligator And Stingray</name>
...
<id>99999</id>
<name>Dolphin With Carp</name>

I used this regex:

 Search: (<name>)(.*)(</name>)
 Replace: \1\u\2\3

The results I received:

<id>1</id>
<name>Alligator and stingray</name>
...
<id>99999</id>
<name>dolphin with carp</name>

It only capitalizes on the first word of the first ID, and the remaining words and words on other IDs remain unchanged (still lowercase)!

I was doing something wrong?

Help appreciated - Thank you.

Answer 1

• Ctrl+H
• Find what: (?:<name>|\G)\K\b(\w)(\w+\s*)
• Replace with: \u$1$2
• check Match case
• check Wrap around
• check Regular expression
• Replace all

Explanation:

(?:<name>|\G)   # non capture group, "<name>" or restart from previous match position
\K              # forget all we have seen until this position
\b              # word boundary
(\w)            # group 1, 1 word character
(\w+\s*)        # group 2, 1 or more word characters followed by optional space

Replacement:

\u$1        # uppercase content of group 1 (i.e. the first letter)
$2          # content of group 2 (i.e. the rest of the word)

Result for given example:

<id>1</id>
<name>Alligator And Stingray</name>
...
<id>99999</id>
<name>Dolphin With Carp</name>

Screen capture:

Answer 2

Try this:

   Find what: ([>\s])([a-z])
Replace with: \1\u\2

This changes a lower case character to upper case if the previous character is a space character or >.

Answer 3

Edit: Use @Toto's answer. This one does not use non-regular language features and can, therefore, never answer the question completely, although it does solve the finite length cases (now).

---

What you are trying to do is only possible if there is a maximum number of words in a <name>...</name> block.

The problem with your current regex is that group \2 applies to the whole of the text inside the tags (alligator and stingray) in your example and \u operates only on the character immediately following it.

If there is a maximum number of words in a node, you may use a regex similar to this one:

Find what: <name>(\w)(\w* ?)(\w?)(\w*? ?)(\w?)(\w*? ?)</name>
Replace with: <name>\U\1\E\2\U\3\E\4\U\5\E\6</name>

If you don't know how many words are in one node, you should use an XML Parser instead.