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How do I fix an all upper-case blog comment?

I like to keep my blog readable and neat, so I fix typos and grammatical errors in comments. Recently I have had a couple of people leave these long comments in all upper-case, which just rubs me the wrong way. Is there some easy way to fix this?

Dave's Answer:

I know what you mean, and I've been known to go into comments and clean things up to make them more comprehensible and easier to read too. I generally leave spelling errors alone, unless they're really ghastly and prevent others from understand what the writer's trying to say, but I'll add paragraph breaks if it's one long, long paragraph, etc. Just to improve readability.

Recently I had someone leave a comment similar to what your'e talking about, about a 1000 word essay on the departure of their dog. All in upper case. All of it, every letter. Ugh.

To fix it, I remembered that in Microsoft Word for the Mac, there's a "sentence case" transform filter that's available, so that's what I used. I got to the comment on my blog, copied the entire text into the copy / paste buffer, then opened up Microsoft Word and pasted the comment into a new, blank document.

With the text all selected, I then choose Format --> Change Case...

Which gives you a bunch of useful choices:

I choose "Sentence case" (which tries to leave the first letter of each sentence in uppercase but otherwise drops everything else into lowercase.

The comment, which had started out reading like:

"MY BLACK AND WHITE COCKER SPANIEL WAS A BIRTHDAY PRESENT FROM MY THEN BOYFRIEND. HE WAS THE ANSWER TO ALL MY PRAYERS. I HAD RAN A STOP SIGN WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN AND MY MOTHER AND ANOTHER MAN HAD PASSED AWAY. "

was quickly transformed into

"My black and white cocker spaniel was a birthday present from my then boyfriend. He was the answer to all my prayers. I had ran a stop sign when i was fifteen and my mother and another man had passed away...."

It's better, but, truth be told, is a bit overzealous because words like "Thursday" and "I" are also dropped into all lowercase: it doesn't recognize proper nouns or similar.

At this point you can either go through and fix the errors you've introduced, or, if you're lazy, you can just figure that even with a few words not properly capitalized, it's still a zillion times better and more readable than the all upper-case comment was originally.

Whatever you do, when you're ready, select all the text in the Microsoft Word for Mac OS X document, copy it (you can use Edit --> Copy), switch back to your blog editor, select all the text from the original comment and then overwrite it with Edit --> Paste.

Save that, and you've fixed their comment. Nice job!

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Categorized: Computer and Internet Basics (Article 8669)
Tagged: blogging, editing, microsoft word, quality control
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Comments

In Word for Windows, there's an "audo-correction" tool you can run on selected text that should correct any obvious mistakes in capitalization - also alt-F7 brings up a grammar correction tool. Don't know if this is available in the Mac version.

Posted by: KatS at December 22, 2008 10:40 AM

Why waste your own time manually editing comments, when you can use a few lines of PHP code to automatically alter the comments so that they are in proper case/sentence case?

There is a built-in function in PHP which capitalizes only the first character of a string: ucfirst()

Unfortunately, that only capitalizes the first character of an entire string. BUT, on the link below, someone has posted a small PHP function that automatically converts a string to sentence case, So every first letter after a period, exclamation mark, question mark, etc, will be capitalized.

I won't post the code, but you can check it out in the post from this link:

http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/function.ucfirst.php#86902

just insert the PHP code into theblog (assuming you are comfortable with editing your blog code) and voila you're done. This is also assuming you know where to put it, but if you know PHP, you should be able to figure it out easily.

Posted by: Adam at December 23, 2008 11:44 AM

how do you put songs on a mp3 player diamond ?

Posted by: m at December 23, 2008 8:59 PM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!