Pascal case to human readable with C# extension methods

August 2nd 2008 11:02 pm

I needed to convert some Pascal case strings to human readable strings. Basically I have an enum containing errors, but wanted a nice way to convert them straight to messages for the exceptions that would be thrown.

Here’s how I did it.

^?View Code CSHARP

public static string ToHumanFromPascal(this string s)
{
    if (2 > s.Length)
    {
        return s;
    }
 
    var sb = new StringBuilder();
    var ca = s.ToCharArray();
    sb.Append(ca[0]);
    for (int i = 1; i < ca.Length - 1; i++)
    {
        char c = ca[i];
        if (char.IsUpper(c) && (char.IsLower(ca[i + 1]) || char.IsLower(ca[i - 1])))
        {
            sb.Append(' ');
        }
        sb.Append(c);
    }
    sb.Append(ca[ca.Length - 1]);
    return sb.ToString();
}

EDIT: Fixed to handle string of length 0 or 1.

About the author... Daniel Huckstep is a software engineer(ing student) at the University of Alberta. He enjoys all aspects of computers and their software, reptiles, guitar and music creation, reading, and macaroni salad.

Posted by darkhelmet under Computers & Programming |

3 Responses to “Pascal case to human readable with C# extension methods”

Dynamic Data and Custom Metadata Providers @ ZDima.net responded on 01 Sep 2008 at 6:18 am #

[...] Line 12: I first check to see if the property already has the DisplayNameAttribute defined. If it does I don’t do anything. But if it doesn’t have this attribute defined, I use the properties name to generate the friendly display name using the ToHumanFromPascal function (which I stole from here). [...]
Steph responded on 19 Sep 2008 at 9:18 am #

Oups!
Your ToHumanFromPascal method will not handle properly strings that are 1 character long.

Add the following at the end:

if (ca.Length > 1)
{
sb.Append(ca[ca.Length – 1]);
}

That’s it!
Stephane.
darkhelmet responded on 19 Sep 2008 at 12:06 pm #

Well to handle that I could do

if (1 == s.length())
return s;

right at the beginning of the function. If the string is only 1 character long, all that is needed it to return the string, so this would solve the problem, unless I’m missing something.