Code.NiceString

I tend to use StrConv(Fields!Field.Value, vbStrConv.ProperCase) a lot in my reports, but am generally unhappy that it forces characters in the middle of words into lowercase too. I recently came across some camelCase strings where I wanted to split the words and preserve acronym capitalisation, while also capitalising the first letter of each word.

I came across this cool discussion of how to do part of this using RegEx on Stack Overflow and ended writing a little custom code snippet for these cases.

Public Shared Function NiceString(ByVal inputString As String) As String
        ' Return a blank string if necessary
        If inputString Is Nothing Then
                Return ""
        Else
                inputString = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(inputString, "((?p{Ll}))", "$0")

                Dim capitalise As Boolean = True
                Dim returnString As New System.Text.StringBuilder(inputString.Length)
                For Each c As Char In inputString
                        returnString.Append(IIf(capitalise, Char.ToUpper(c), c))
                        capitalise = Not Char.IsLetter(c)
                Next c

                Return returnString.ToString()
        End If
End Function

It can be called like this:

=Code.NiceString(Fields!Field.Value)

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