A Title Case Gem for Ruby

A project I’m working on called for some “smart” capitalisation of page titles. Essentially I wanted to take a URL slug and generate a page title.

Rails comes with a built-in String#titleize method that capitalises every word but that looked a little odd when the title was something like: “My Hovercraft Is Full Of Eels”. So I went on a hunt for something “smarter”.

After a little search I stumbled upon Marshall Elfstrand’s JavaScript, Ruby, and Objective-C ports of John Gruber’s “Title Case” algorithm and decided to turn it into a Gem that adds String#titleize and String#titleize! (aliased as #titlecase, and #titlecase! respectively). When used in a Rails environment, this effectively replaces the Rails versions.

Now my page titles look a little more human-like: “My Hovercraft is Full of Eels”.