I have a co-worker who writes news releases that are titled ENTIRELY IN CAPS. While this may be effective in email communication, or even a standard when making a news release. The look and feel of it can reduce its value to the point of not even wanting to see it.

The problem I ran into is that I needed to convert this to lowercase and then Capitalize the first character of every word. To do this, simply create an XSL file with the following code:

<xsl:variable name=”lowercase”>
          abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name=”uppercase”>
          ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
</xsl:variable>
            <xsl:variable name=”toconvert”>
                      ALL THIS TEXT IS WRITTEN IN CAPS AND IS DRIVING ME CRAZY
            </xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name=”newtext”>
          <xsl:value-of select=”translate($toconvert,$uppercase,$lowercase)”/>
</xsl:variable>

This code will put the new text into a variable called newtext, which could then be displayed. To capitalize the first letter of every word, simply style it with CSS using text-transform:capitalize;

You can also convert everything from lowercase to uppercase by simply switching the last line of text with this one.

<xsl:variable name=”newtext”>
          <xsl:value-of select=”translate($toconvert,$lowercase,$uppercase)”/>
</xsl:variable>

I hope you find this useful! Also, if anyone has figured out how to turn a certain word to uppercase, let me know. For example, convert an acronym like “fbi” into “FBI”. This acronym is in a sentence, so the code above wouldn’t work!

1. How would this work for multiple xsl fields? I don’t want to apply it to my entire style sheet.

   Thanks.

   Brenda on December 16th, 2009 at 6:31 pm