BibTeX, biblatex and biber ⇒ Capitalize first letter of each title sentence?

[Matifou]

Hi

Bibtex by default will "de-capitalize" article titles, keeping only the first letter of whole title. This make sense, but if I have a two sentences title, I get something like:

BibTeX guide. the difficulty of getting capitals

Sure I could add in each citation a {} for first letter of second sentence but.. is there not something more automatic?

Thanks!!

[frabjous]

I doubt there's a way to handle this internal to BibTeX or LaTeX, and it's dependent upon the bst file anyway, but if you're using a halfway decent editor, you should be able to add the braces to the bib file with a single RegEx Find and Replace. If your editor doesn't support RegEx, it's time to get a different editor.

[Matifou]

well it is this change.case function actually (so not really .bst dependent I think), so yes indeed very difficult to change...

Regexp is a good idea, I have the editor but not the brain! Any small hint I could work on? I guess rule should specify check only title line, replace letter by {letter} directly after first point, right?

Thanks!!

[frabjous]

Well, you didn't tell me what editor you're using and what specific version of RegEx it uses. For more simple RegEx system, I would search for:

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\(title\s*=\s*{[^}\.]*\.\s*\)\([A-Z]\)

And replace with:

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\1{\2}

So in Vim for example, the command would be:

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:%s/\(title\s*=\s*{[^}\.]*\.\s*\)\([A-Z]\)/\1{\2}/  

I think the same could be used with sed from the commandline on Unix-type systems (or, I guess, with sed for Windows):

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sed 's/\(title\s*=\s*{[^}\.]*\.\s*\)\([A-Z]\)/\1{\2}/' input.bib > output.bib

But if your editor uses perl-compatible or extended Regular Expressions instead, I think this would need to be changed... to search for:

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(title\s*=\s*\{[^\}\.]*\.\s*)([A-Z]) 

and replace with:

Code: Select all

\1\{\2\}

So you could use:

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perl -pe 's/(title\s*=\s*\{[^\}\.]*\.\s*)([A-Z])/\1\{\2\}/' input.bib > output.bib

From the command line.

All of the above assumes your entries look like:

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title = {Something. Something},

And not:

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title = "Something. Something",

or

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title = {Something.
         Something}

And that TITLE is not in all caps, etc., so it would really help to know what program you're using, exactly how it is formatted now, etc.

And FWIW, the change case function you mentioned is something built in to the .bst file. Not all .bst affect the case of titles.

[Matifou]

Dear Frabjous

Thanks so much for providing these more than detailed explanations! Very kind of you! I will go through them but consider definitely the topic as resolved!

Thanks again!