LiveCode Forums.

Hi there

I want to make sure that the first letter of each sentence is capitalized in the output text in a field.
I thought the easy way was to use the sentence chunk. But it seems that the sentence chunk does not work with a sentence that starts with a lowercase character after a period.


Example: ... returns 1 in the message box
and ... returns 2 in the message box

So I guess this has something to do with the ICU library?
Anyone know an easy solution to this?

I really must get into v7. There is no "sentence" chunk in v.6.

It would seem that the caseSensitive property ought to handle this, but if it does not, then I suppose you are left to kluge it yourself. The only problem is those pesky periods that live inside of normally parsed sentences, like:

"I gave $3.50 to my favorite charity, dunbarxPleadingForCash.com just last week."

Otherwise a snap to make such a thing.

By the way, how does the sentence chunk deal with the above silliness? Does it only fire at the end of strings, followed by a space or CR and an uppercase letter?

Craig Newman

I don't know.But! although it is good practice, there are plenty of tracts where a sentence does not preserve a space after the preceding full stop.(period for US types. Which is not the only end of sentence marker. Or is it?no, seriously, right? ) Or other anomalies, like a dot.com bubble bursting into a raincloud over the sentence parade.
Er... What rules govern what constitutes a "Sentence Chunk"?
"The only problem"...? A snap? Well yes, but only having chosen a ruleset. What is the ruleset in use here? (and yes, please excuse this additional silliness).

SparkOut wrote:What rules govern what constitutes a "Sentence Chunk"?

The Dictionary entry for "sentence" notes the ICU library as handling the details of defining what a sentence is, and includes this link for more info:
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/#Se ... Boundaries

Natural language parsing is complex stuff. No doubt it's possible to find edge cases the ICU library wasn't designed to handle.

Yes, my additional silliness was meant to highlight that a ruleset that has to try and work with natural language is very complex, and a worse job to consider even than the CSV fiasco. And "natural language" these days - what about twitter and Facebook? Nightmarish.

Always looking for shortcuts but I suspected I had to kluge this.

Thanks for the answers.