str.title() fails with words containing apostrophes

[Peter Otten]

Jussi Piitulainen wrote:

> gvmcmt at gmail.com writes:
> 
>> On Sunday, March 5, 2017 at 11:25:04 PM UTC+5:30, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
>>> I'm trying to convert strings to Title Case, but getting ugly results
>>> if the words contain an apostrophe:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> py> 'hello world'.title()  # okay
>>> 'Hello World'
>>> py> "i can't be having with this".title()  # not okay
>>> "I Can'T Be Having With This"
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Anyone have any suggestions for working around this?
> 
> [snip sig]
> 
>> import string
>>
>> txt = "i can't be having with this"
>> string.capwords(txt)
>>
>> That gives you "I Can't Be Having With This"
>>
>> Hope that helps.
> 
> Won't Steve D'aprano And D'arcy Cain Be Happy Now :)

Perhaps one could limit the conversion to go from lower to upper only, as 
names tend be in the desired case in the original text.

>>> def first_up(s):
...     return s[:1].upper() + s[1:]
... 
>>> def title(s):
...     return re.compile(r"(?:\b'?)\w+").sub(lambda m: first_up(m.group()), 
s)
... 
>>> title("won't steve D'Aprano and d'arcy cain be 'happy' now?")
"Won't Steve D'Aprano And D'arcy Cain Be 'Happy' Now?"

Unfortunately this won't help with 

>>> title("admiral von schneider")
'Admiral Von Schneider'  # von should be lower case