Formatting Postal Addresses

Question

I'm a legacy programmer rather new to java. The company I'm working for has decided (finally) to get more involved with the www.
One thing I am working on, is providing customer information online. I'm using the legacy database that currently holds customer info. My problem is that everything is in all caps. How can I make this:
555 MEMORIAL DRIVE
ANYWHERE US 35555-5555
Look like this:
555 Memorial Drive
Anywhere, US 35555-5555
I used the following code for the name, which was relitively easy:
fullName = firstName.charAt(0) + firstName.trim().toLowerCase().substring(1) + " " +     
     lastName.charAt(0) + lastName.trim().toLowerCase().substring(1);
I'll be continuing my online research but I thought someone here might have some good advice for me.
Thanks in advance for the info!
bfrmbama

Answer 1

Rather than using strings, I created a character array and then manipulated the array elements. It seems to have more flexibility. I accomodated all of your example (except the comma following the state, which your code also doesn't handle) and DrClap's suggestion. The handling of the state abbreviation is not pretty, but unless you have some additional information such as positional information, word count location, etc, or an external source to identify state abbreviations, I doubt that much more can be done.
The best solution might be a combination of character array and string processing.
public class AddressFix
    public static void main(String[] args)
        // sample data
        String[] input = new String[2];
        input[0] = "555 n. MEMoRiAL dRIVE";
        input[1] = "ANYWHERE-viLLE us 35555-5555";
        AddressFix addr = new AddressFix();
        for (int n = 0; n < input.length; n++)
            System.out.println(addr.fixup(input[n]));
    String fixup(String in)
        String line = in.toLowerCase();
        // remove multiple spaces
        line = line.replaceAll(" +", " ");
        char[] lineArray = line.toCharArray();
        char priorChar = ' ';
        for (int n = 0; n < lineArray.length; n++)
            char letter = lineArray[n];
            // this char is a letter
            if (Character.isLetter(letter))
                // prior char is not a letter
                if (!Character.isLetter(priorChar))
                    lineArray[n] = Character.toUpperCase(letter);
                // so, prior char is a letter and if these 2 letters
                // are surrounded by spaces, assume a state abbrev.
                else if (n > 1     // needed to keep array in bounds
                     && n < (lineArray.length - 1)          // ditto
                     && lineArray[n - 2] == ' '
                     && lineArray[n + 1] == ' ')
                    lineArray[n] = Character.toUpperCase(letter);
            priorChar = letter;
        return new String(lineArray);
}OUTPUT:
555 N. Memorial Drive
Anywhere-Ville US 35555-5555