Capitalize first letter of a defined variable

Question

I'm trying to capitalize the first, and only the first letter of line which I have defined as \mytext. I've used {\MakeUppercase put text here?}... until now. But now I have it as a variable

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
  \def \mytext {hi how are you?}       

{\MakeUppercase hi how are you?} \par        % => Hi how are you?
{\MakeUppercase \mytext}                     % => HI HOW ARE YOU?
\end{document}

How can I make the first letter of the defined variable capitalized? Thanks in advance!

Possible duplicate of Command to uppercase the first letter of each word in a sentence — Moriambar, Apr 04 '17 at 18:13
@Moriambar, I had already seen that question and it's answer and I didn't quite get what would answer my question. — Bjartmar, Apr 04 '17 at 18:51
@Moriambar although that question does cover it, its complexified by the addition of the indexing requirement. — Paul Stanley, Apr 04 '17 at 19:51
See David's answer, below. Here is what happened: {\MakeUppercase x} applies uppercase to whatever x is. If x is \mytext it applies uppercase to the text as a unit, then writes it out. But with the \expandafter used, \mytext is first written out (virtually) THEN uppercase is applied, so it catches just the first letter of the text. — , Apr 04 '17 at 22:27

score 21 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 04 '17 at 18:13

21

  \expandafter\MakeUppercase \mytext

answered Apr 04 '17 at 18:13

David Carlisle

757,742

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 05 '17 at 11:22

Here's another approach:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{mfirstuc}

\begin{document}
  \def \mytext {hi how are you?}

  \xmakefirstuc{\mytext}
\end{document}

This works much like David's answer, but can also handle awkward cases where the text includes text-block formatting commands (where the first argument is the text that needs formatting). For example:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{mfirstuc}

\begin{document}
  \def \mytext {hi how are you?}

  \xmakefirstuc{\mytext}

  \def \mytext {\emph{hi} how are you?}

  \xmakefirstuc{\mytext}
\end{document}

In the second case above, it's effectively doing:

\emph{\MakeUppercase hi} how are you?

A simple \expandafter\MakeUppercase\mytext approach causes:

\MakeUppercase\emph{hi} how are you?

which doesn't work as it's attempting \MakeUppercase{\emph}.

The commands provided by mfirstuc don't work with declarations (such as \em or \itshape) as the package is designed for semantic markup not free-form formatting. You can use semantic markup to deal with quoted or parenthetical material. For example:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{mfirstuc}

\begin{document}

  \newcommand*{\qt}[1]{``#1''}

  \def \mytext {\qt{hi how are you?}}

  \xmakefirstuc{\mytext}
\end{document}

Another point to consider is whether or not you intend using UTF-8 characters with inputenc. This isn't a problem with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX, but with LaTeX the UTF-8 character is treated as two octets. For example:

\def \mytext {ĥi how are you?}
\expandafter\MakeUppercase\mytext

This causes the error:

! Argument of \UTFviii@two@octets has an extra }.

because \MakeUppercase has only grabbed the first octet. The same error occurs with \xmakefirstuc unless you load datatool-base (at least v2.24) after inputenc and before mfirstuc:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{datatool-base}
\usepackage{mfirstuc}

\begin{document}

  \def \mytext {ĥi how are you?}

  \xmakefirstuc{\mytext}
\end{document}

Is there a way to protect a certain word and keep it unchanged? For example, suppose you want to write the sentence: "Welcome to the USA", whether it is written in all caps (WELCOME TO THE USA) or not (welcome to the USA). I thought about using \makefirstuc{\MakeLowercase{ \mytext }} but it does not do the job. Any tip? It would be nice if using braces around the word, it could preserve as it is, for example using welcome to the {USA} . — LEo, Dec 11 '20 at 19:04

Capitalize first letter of a defined variable

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