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Lowering the first word in a CamelCase Word (Python recipe) by Mike Hostetler
ActiveState Code (http://code.activestate.com/recipes/387663/)

This function converts the first word in a CamelCase work to lowercase. I.e. "CustomerID" becomes "customerID", "XMLInfo" becomes "xmlInfo"

Python, 29 lines
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import string

def lowerFirstCamelWord(word):
    """ puts the first word in a CamelCase Word in lowercase.

    I.e. CustomerID becomes customerID, XMLInfoTest becomes xmlInfoTest
    """
    newstr = ''
    swapped = word.swapcase()
    idx = 0

    # if it's all-caps, return an all-lowered version
    lowered = word.lower()

    if swapped == lowered:
        return lowered

    for c in swapped:
        if c in string.lowercase:
            newstr += c
            idx += 1
        else:
            break
    if idx < 2:
        newstr += word[idx:]
    else:
        newstr = newstr[:-1]+ word[idx-1:]

    return newstr

This function works by comparing flipping the case on all the characters in the CamelCase word, taking the first lowercase letters from that and, when the first capital letter shows up, take the rest of the letters from the original word.

If the word given is all in uppercase, an all-lowercased version is returned.

It can be expensive doing a character-by-character comparision of the word, but most of these words will be short (i.e. not thousands of characters long) so there shouldn't be a big performance impact.

Tags: text

2 comments

Justus Pendleton 19 years, 2 months ago  # | flag

a variant using re.

import re
def unwiki (word):
    m = re.search ('[a-z]', word)
    if not m: return word.lower()
    p = m.start(0) - 1
    return word[:p].lower() + word[p:]
nishant shekhar 14 years, 6 months ago  # | flag

this site is good but its feedback is that it not show the full program code