How to capitalize the first character of each word in a string

The following method converts all the letters into upper/lower case, depending on their position near a space or other special chars.

public static String capitalizeString(String string) {
  char[] chars = string.toLowerCase().toCharArray();
  boolean found = false;
  for (int i = 0; i < chars.length; i++) {
    if (!found && Character.isLetter(chars[i])) {
      chars[i] = Character.toUpperCase(chars[i]);
      found = true;
    } else if (Character.isWhitespace(chars[i]) || chars[i]=='.' || chars[i]=='\'') { // You can add other chars here
      found = false;
    }
  }
  return String.valueOf(chars);
}

With this simple code:

String example="hello";

example=example.substring(0,1).toUpperCase()+example.substring(1, example.length());

System.out.println(example);

Result: Hello

This might be useful if you need to capitalize titles. It capitalizes each substring delimited by " ", except for specified strings such as "a" or "the". I haven't ran it yet because it's late, should be fine though. Uses Apache Commons StringUtils.join() at one point. You can substitute it with a simple loop if you wish.

private static String capitalize(String string) {
    if (string == null) return null;
    String[] wordArray = string.split(" "); // Split string to analyze word by word.
    int i = 0;
lowercase:
    for (String word : wordArray) {
        if (word != wordArray[0]) { // First word always in capital
            String [] lowercaseWords = {"a", "an", "as", "and", "although", "at", "because", "but", "by", "for", "in", "nor", "of", "on", "or", "so", "the", "to", "up", "yet"};
            for (String word2 : lowercaseWords) {
                if (word.equals(word2)) {
                    wordArray[i] = word;
                    i++;
                    continue lowercase;
                }
            }
        }
        char[] characterArray = word.toCharArray();
        characterArray[0] = Character.toTitleCase(characterArray[0]);
        wordArray[i] = new String(characterArray);
        i++;
    }
    return StringUtils.join(wordArray, " "); // Re-join string
}