headline-style

This filter changes a given text to Title Caps, and attempts to be clever about SMALL words like a/an/the in the input. The list of "SMALL words" which are not capped comes from the New York Times Manual of Style, plus some others like 'vs' and 'v'.

The filter employs some heuristics to guess abbreviations that don't need conversion.

Example ... 'this is a text' is converted to 'This Is The Text'.

More examples and expected behavior for corner cases are available in the package test suite.

Issues, updates, pull requests, etc should be directed to github.

Installation

The easiest method is to simply use pip:

(sudo) pip install headline_style

Usage

headline_style provides only one function, simply:

>>> from headLineStyle import headLineStyle
>>> headLineStyle('a thing')
'A Thing'

A callback function may also be supplied, which will be called for every word:

>>> def abbreviations(word, **kwargs):
...   if word.upper() in ('TCP', 'UDP'):
...     return word.upper()
...
>>> headLineStyle.headLineStyle('a simple tcp and udp wrapper', callback=abbreviations)
'A Simple TCP and UDP Wrapper'

The callback function is supplied with an all_caps keyword argument, indicating whether the entire line of text was entirely capitalized. Returning None from the callback function will allow headLineStyle to process the word as normal.

Command Line Usage

headLineStyle also provides a command line utility headLineStyle:

>>>  $ headLineStyle make me a title
... Make Me a Title
... $ echo "Can pipe and/or whatever else" | headLineStyle
... Can Pipe and/or Whatever Else
... # Or read/write files:
... $ headLineStyle -f infile -o outfile

In addition, commonly used acronyms can be kept in a local file at ~/.headLineStyle.txt. This file contains one acronym per line. The acronym will be maintained in the title as it is provided. Once there is e.g. one line saying TCP, then it will be automatically used when used from the command line.

>>> $ headLineStyle I LOVE TCP
>>> I Love TCP

Limitations

This is a best-effort library that uses regexes to try to do intelligent things, but will have limitations. For example, it does not have the contextual awareness to distinguish acronyms from words: us (we) versus US (United States).

The regexes and titlecasing rules were written for American English. While there is basic support for Unicode characters, such that something like "El Niño" will work, it is likely that accents or non-English phrases will not be handled correctly.

If anyone has concrete solutions to improve these or other shortcomings of the library, pull requests are very welcome!

License

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Copyright [2022] [Vinod Baste]

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.