[Grep] how catch a single quote/ apostrophe in Grep

[-Dain-]

Hi guys,

I used a grep style in order to capitalize the first letter of every word on a paragraph (for titles) and I wonder how to correctly catch the single quote/ apostrophe in the sentence, in order not to capitalize some words.

\b(?!(d.|de|des|du|et|au|aux)\b)[\u\l]

I used the following grep, which actually works fine but I had to cheat in order to make it work.

\b(?!(d.|de|des|du|et|au|aux)\b)[\u\l]

exemple of sentence to capitalize : " Messieurs, mesdames d'Arizona, bonjour "

As you could see, I used " d. " for not Capitalizing the " d' " and not making " D' ".

Since the folowwing grep doesn't work, what should I write to excatly catch the single quote/ apostrophe, rather than cheating using the dot.

\b(?!(d'|de|des|du|et|au|aux)\b)[\u\l] -- not working. the ' isn't recognized, neither \'

Thanks for your insights

[-Dain-]

Sorry for the double writting of the grep. A shame we can't edit our posts…

[Peter Spier]

~' is the GREP sequence to find the apostrophe

[-Dain-]

Well, I tried that one too, but it doesn't work either 😕

[Peter Spier · Accepted solution]

Looks like ID is recognizing the apostrophe as a word boundary. Seems like putting it in a class does work, however.

Try

\b(?!(d[']|de|des|du|et|au|aux)\b)[\u\l]

Also, you may not need the de, des, or du if you use d[eu'] and au may cover aux as well, but I haven't tested that.

[-Dain-]

Thanks for having found the easiest way to do it and thank you for tips as well. I'm still not quite acustomed with the short ways to write Grep and scripts. I'll be there, eventually ^^

[jmlevy]

This works:

\<\l(?!')

 but I have a question: why do you want to capitalize the first letter of each word of a title? It's against the French typographic rules and it seems that you work in French…

[-Dain-]

Thanks for the answer. Seems again there are many ways to get to a viable solution ^^
As per for my need Vs the French typographic rules, I know and understand the point, but let's just say the demand is for the game industry and typographic rules there are commonmy violated for the sake of a supposedly "visual improvement".

Besides, I have no real control on the decison 😕

[Peter Spier]

Been thinking about this a bit more, and while it might be working for you at the moment, I thinjk in the general case it may be a failure as it misght not capitalize some words you might intend to be capitalized if they happen to start with de, au or et.

[-Dain-]

I guess just adding a text space after au/de/... will do the thing