How do I change the first letter lowercase to uppercase in notepad++?

Mohamed Mohamed

I want to change all first letters from lowercase to uppercase inside square brackets in notepad++, for example from [gasps] to [Gasps]. But if it is the characters name inside square brackets, make all caps.
This is what i have done and the outcome.

mkupper

@Mohamed-Mohamed You were close to what is needed. The [ and ] characters are special in the search part of a regular expression and so you need to put a \ in front of them.

It’s not clear though if you want just the first letter or the entire thing inside the [ ... ] to be capitals.

If the first letter then use
Search for: [([a-z]+)]
Replace with: [\u\1]

If the entire word then use [\U\1] with a capital ‘U’ instead of lower case ‘u’ in the replace part.

See https://npp-user-manual.org/docs/searching/#substitutions for how the \u and \U work in the replacement part of a regular expression.

It’s also not clear if you want [Explosion] to become [EXPLOSION]. As you have match-case enabled the search for [a-z] would not match a capital ‘E’. If you want [EXPLOSION] then you can either turn the match-case tick box off or you can preface the search part with (?i) to ignore case (Search for (?i)[([a-z]+)]) or you can search for [([A-Za-z]+)] In https://npp-user-manual.org/docs/searching/#regular-expressions there are various \ followed by a letter things you can use to search for letters, lower case letters, etc. Use whatever you feel comfortable with.

Mohamed Mohamed

@mkupper Thank you it worked, but is it possible to make all characters names be capslock e.g. [JOHN].

Mark Olson

@Mohamed-Mohamed
You’d need a | -separated list of all the characters’ names.

For example, if the characters are named

John
Bob
Mary
Ellen
Fred

your regex becomes (?i)\\[(?:(John|Bob|Mary|Ellen|Fred)|([a-z]+))\\]
and your replacement becomes [(?1\U${1}\E:(?2\u${2}))]
Thus, you would convert

[explosion]
[crash]
[john]
yo dawg
[Ellen]
i herd u like regex
[bob]
so i made regex
[boom]
[pow]
[mary]
so u can regex
[zap]
[fred]
with regex

into

[Explosion]
[Crash]
[JOHN]
yo dawg
[ELLEN]
i herd u like regex
[BOB]
so i made regex
[Boom]
[Pow]
[MARY]
so u can regex
[Zap]
[FRED]
with regex