MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - [Old Thread] Capitalize first word in sentence with search and replace?

ianc · 11-19-2012, 04:43 PM

Hi Folks,

I've converted a .PDF file to .epub and was able to remove the headers and footers with only a little difficulty.

I notice, however, that after the conversion, a lot of the capitalization at the beginning of sentences has been lost (unrelated to headers and footers), which is rather annoying.

It occurred to me to use a regex to locate lower case chars at the start of sentences. Initially, I could think of two cases:

1) First character in the sentence after a paragraph break. Can locate with "\.<br>\s+[a-z]"

2) First character in the sentence in the middle of a paragraph, assuming the previous sentence ends with a period and is followed by one space. Can locate with "\. [a-z]".

My question is, what should I use in the replacement text box to cause Calibre to substitute the upper case char for that which was found by the original search regex?

At first I just tried "\.<br>\s+[A-Z]" and "\. [A-Z]", but the replacement just took those literal text strings and wrote them into the book, so that, for example, every sentence beginning with a lower case character in the middle of a paragraph now begins with "\. [A-Z]" rather than the correct letter.

Thanks for any help,

ianc

11-19-2012, 04:43 PM	#1
ianc Member Posts: 12 Karma: 472024 Join Date: Nov 2012 Device: Samsung Galaxy S3	[Old Thread] Capitalize first word in sentence with search and replace? Hi Folks, I've converted a .PDF file to .epub and was able to remove the headers and footers with only a little difficulty. I notice, however, that after the conversion, a lot of the capitalization at the beginning of sentences has been lost (unrelated to headers and footers), which is rather annoying. It occurred to me to use a regex to locate lower case chars at the start of sentences. Initially, I could think of two cases: 1) First character in the sentence after a paragraph break. Can locate with "\.<br>\s+[a-z]" 2) First character in the sentence in the middle of a paragraph, assuming the previous sentence ends with a period and is followed by one space. Can locate with "\. [a-z]". My question is, what should I use in the replacement text box to cause Calibre to substitute the upper case char for that which was found by the original search regex? At first I just tried "\.<br>\s+[A-Z]" and "\. [A-Z]", but the replacement just took those literal text strings and wrote them into the book, so that, for example, every sentence beginning with a lower case character in the middle of a paragraph now begins with "\. [A-Z]" rather than the correct letter. Thanks for any help, ianc