Converting String to camelCase

Question

Hi All,
I have couple of questions
1. I want to convert normal java string into camelCase.
e.g. JAVA_FORUM should be converted to javaForum or java_Forum
2. I have created a utility class which extracts Table structure from Database and creates an xml file. The structure of this xml file is
<database>
<table name="ACTIVITY_FUNCTION">
<column name="ACTIVITY_ID" type="java.math.BigDecimal"/>
<column name="FUNCTION_ID" type="java.math.BigDecimal"/>
</table>
</databse>
Now i am applying XSLT on this xml to create java class. The problem here is the generated java class doesnt follow standard naming convention for instance variable as well as the getters and setters.
private java.math.BigDecimal ACTIVITY_ID;
public java.math.BigDecimal getACTIVITY_ID() {
return ACTIVITY_ID;
public void setACTIVITY_ID
(java.math.BigDecimal ACTIVITY_ID) {
this.ACTIVITY_ID = ACTIVITY_ID;
is there any way i can create java classes with proper naming convention?
Thanks in advance...

Answer 1

Converting arbitrary strings into camel case is pretty much impossible, in my opinion. You'd have to know the words that were making up the string, whether they were acronyms or abbreviations and even then, different people might consider different points to be word boundaries. For example, consider uppercase. It's a valid word but someone might want to write it as upperCase ( I know, trying too hard, but I couldn't come up with anything else ).
However, since your strings seem to have the words separated by underscores, you could simply look for the next underscore in the string and capitalize the letter after that. But I'd like to point out that according to the Sun Code Conventions For Java [1], underscores ( separating upper case letters ) are supposed to be used for constants. Normal variables should have camel case names.
As for valid getter names, the ones you have are valid; they're just not conventional. The JavaBeans spec only requires that the getter/ setter have 'set'/ 'get', followed by the uppercase first letter of the variable and the rest of the name as is. In your case, the first letter is already capitalized so there's no change. But it doesn't make it invalid.
[1] http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/html/CodeConventions.doc8.html#367
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EDIT: Took much, much too long to hit the 'Reply' button and also, seem to have got the problem wrong. :/
Edited by: nogoodatcoding on Oct 11, 2007 10:52 AM