titlecase

What it is and what it does

Titlecase is a text formatting library that converts strings to title case while intelligently preserving small words (a, an, the, and, or, etc.) in lowercase based on New York Times style conventions. It also attempts to detect and preserve acronyms and abbreviations that are already in all caps. The library provides both a Python API and a command-line tool, making it useful for one-off conversions or integration into larger text-processing pipelines.

The package has no runtime dependencies and supports Python 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10. It uses regex-based heuristics to handle edge cases, though it acknowledges limitations with contextual awareness (e.g., distinguishing 'us' the pronoun from 'US' the country) and non-English text. The library is a modern port of John Gruber's original titlecase.pl Perl script, maintained on GitHub with a stable user base.

Use it for

• Format user-generated titles or headlines in web applications before display or storage.
• Batch-process document titles or CSV headers from the command line using the titlecase utility.
• Normalize book, article, or product names in data pipelines while preserving common acronyms via callback functions.
• Convert all-caps or mixed-case text to consistent title formatting in content management systems.
• Implement custom capitalization rules for domain-specific acronyms by providing a callback function.

Worth the install?

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Install

titlecase on PyPI

Before you install

High install friction due to source-only distribution (no wheels). The package is in aging maintenance status—last release was 2023-09-23, over a year ago—though the repository remains active and the code is marked Production/Stable. Suitable for stable, non-critical text processing tasks where you don't expect frequent updates.

Requires Python 3.7 or later. Source distribution only (no wheels), so installation requires a working C compiler and development headers if your environment lacks pre-built packages.

License in practice

MIT license (permissive) means you can use, modify, and distribute this package freely in commercial and private projects with minimal restrictions, provided you include the license notice.

Quickstart

pip install titlecase

from titlecase import titlecase
result = titlecase('a thing')
print(result)  # 'A Thing'

# With callback for custom handling:
def abbreviations(word, **kwargs):
    if word.upper() in ('TCP', 'UDP'):
        return word.upper()

result = titlecase('a simple tcp and udp wrapper', callback=abbreviations)
print(result)  # 'A Simple TCP and UDP Wrapper'

Package facts

Evidence: titlecase-2.4.1.tar.gz

Tags

More Filters packages

See also case-converter · case-conversion · reporters-db · english-words · indic-nlp-library · redlines · wordninja · pluralizer · textcase · codespell