Formula to enforce sentence formatting

Question

Post Author: Janis
CA Forum: Formula
I have searched the forums and have not found an answer to this...
I have a text field on my report which is basically used for lengthy notes ( ten sentences or so) on a particular contact/customer. My users are able to type text anyway the see fit.  For example, the sentence "He is very satisfied with our services." can be written as "HE IS VERY SATISFIED WITH OUR SERVICES." or "he is very satisfied with our services." or "hE Is VERY saTIsFiED with oUr SERviceS.", or in any combination of uppercase and lowercase letters.
This looks horrible on the report.  What I need to know is if there is a way to force all of the text into some type of true sentence structure, meaning that only the first word of each sentence is capitalized?  So, in my example, even when users enter text like stated above, the report will display He is very satisfied with our services.
Using the uppercase or lowercase functions do not give the desired results.  I am currently using the propercase function, but this does not give the desired results since the first letter of each word is capitalized.
Any help would be much appreciated!
Janis

Answer 1

Post Author: SKodidine
CA Forum: Formula
Perhaps not the most efficient but that is all I can think of right now other than creating/modifying a custom function to capitalize the first word of the sentence.
Assumptions:    Every sentence is terminated with a period. 
                        After every period there is a space or two.
Here is the formula:
STRINGVAR X := LCASE({YOURTEXT.FIELD});         // convert the entire string to lowercase
X := REPLACE(X,'. ','.');                                                      // repeated twice to handle either one space
X := REPLACE(X,'. ','.');                                                      // after the period or two
STRINGVAR TEMP;
STRINGVAR FINAL;
NUMBERVAR Z;
NUMBERVAR STRLEN :=    LENGTH (X);
NUMBERVAR I;
FOR I := 1 TO STRLEN DO                                                // get the count of number of sentences by counting
(                                                                                // the number of periods
            IF X[I] = '.' THEN Z := Z + 1;
IF Z = 0 THEN Z := 1;
FOR I := 1 TO Z DO                                                 // process each sentence
            TEMP := SPLIT(X,'.')[I];                                         
            FINAL := FINAL & UCASE(TEMP[1]) & TEMP[2 TO LEN(TEMP)] & '. ';
FINAL;