A Ruby gem that converts strings to proper title case following APA (American Psychological Association) style guidelines. Apacify capitalizes strings while keeping minor words (articles, prepositions, conjunctions) lowercase, except when they appear at the beginning or end of the title, or after sentence-ending punctuation.

1. Capitalize the first word of the title/heading and of any subtitle/subheading;
2. Capitalize all "major" words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns) in the title/heading, including the second part of hyphenated major words (e.g., Self-Report not Self-report); and
3. Capitalize all words of four letters or more.

This boils down to using lowercase only for "minor" words of three letters or fewer, namely, for conjunctions (words like and, or, nor, and but), articles (the words a, an, and the), and prepositions (words like as, at, by, for, in, of, on, per, and to), as long as they aren't the first word in a title or subtitle. You can see examples of title case in our post on reference titles.

Source

Install the gem and add to the application's Gemfile by executing:

bundle add apacify

If bundler is not being used to manage dependencies, install the gem by executing:

gem install apacify

require "apacify"

"train your mind for peak performance: a science-based approach for achieving your goals".apacify
# => "Train Your Mind for Peak Performance: A Science-Based Approach for Achieving Your Goals"

Minor words stay lowercase (unless at beginning/end):

"the art of war".apacify
# => "The Art of War"

Words after punctuation are capitalized:

"title: the subtitle".apacify
# => "Title: The Subtitle"

Hyphenated words are handled properly:

"mother-in-law".apacify
# => "Mother-In-Law"

You can specify words to ignore during title case conversion. Ignored words will preserve their original case and bypass all capitalization rules:

"tokyo night (feat. evangeline)".apacify(ignore: "feat.")
# => "Tokyo Night (feat. Evangeline)"

"the quick brown fox".apacify(ignore: ["quick", "fox"])
# => "The quick Brown fox"

# Case-sensitive matching: "FEAT." != "feat."
"tokyo night (FEAT. evangeline)".apacify(ignore: "feat.")
# => "Tokyo Night (Feat. Evangeline)"  # FEAT. not ignored, gets capitalized

• Follows APA style title case rules
• Capitalizes first and last words regardless of length
• Keeps minor words lowercase in the middle
• Capitalizes words after sentence-ending punctuation
• Handles hyphenated words correctly
• Preserves original spacing and punctuation
• Words 4 letters or longer are always capitalized
• Ignore specific words from capitalization rules

Rails' titleize capitalizes every word, while Apacify follows proper APA title case rules by keeping minor words lowercase and preserving hyphens.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/arzezak/apacify. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the Apacify project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.