Capitalize in Dart

Welcome to the Capitalize in Dart page! Here, you'll find the source code for this program as well as a description of how the program works.

Current Solution

import 'dart:io';

main(List<String> args) {

  if (args.isEmpty || args[0].isEmpty) {
    print("Usage: please provide a string");
    exit(1);
  }

  print(capitalize(args[0]));
}

String capitalize(String input) =>
    '${input[0].toUpperCase()}${input.substring(1)}';

Capitalize in Dart was written by:

• Jeremy Grifski
• Paddy

This article was written by:

• Jeremy Grifski
• rzuckerm
• slashdoom

If you see anything you'd like to change or update, please consider contributing.

How to Implement the Solution

It's probably worth noting up front that there is a strings library available that includes a capitalize function with more error checking than we have here. Since it's not one of the Dart built-in libraries, this would need to be installed with pub get or flutter pub get. It would probably be worthwhile in a larger Dart/Flutter project where the package's additional functions may also be useful.

The built-in library that we are going to use, dart:io, is imported at the top and will give us access to the stdin and stdout properties and the exit function.

Dart uses the function name main as an entry point for the program and since we don't expect any return data from main no type has been specified. Within the main function's parameters, you'll see List<String> args which will define args as a list of strings and fill this list with input from the command line in the form of arguments which in this case are simply strings separated by spaces.

For example:

dart capitalize.dart "Hello World"

…would fill the args list as [Hello World].

Our first check tests if any data was passed to the script via arguments by checking the isEmpty property of the args list.

• If args is empty, we print out an error message and use the dart:io exit() function to exit out of the script with a proper error code.
• Otherwise, we assume that data was entered as an argument and continue on.

Our next check tests the first string in the args list since this is the only item in the list that we're actually going to process for capitalization.

• If args[0] is empty, we print out an error message and use the dart:io exit() function to exit out of the script with a proper error code.
• Otherwise, we assume we have a good string to process and continue on.

With this check complete we're ready to proceed and capitalize the string input. Because we want to print out the result we call our capitalize() function within the print() function. Within capitalize's parameters we pass the args[0] list element that we've tested.

Because our capitalize function is a one line piece of code, we're able to use Dart's shorthand function syntax which uses "=>" as a simple way to return the outcome of the one line expression as the value of the function.

Even though the capitalize expression ('${input[0].toUpperCase()}${input.substring(1)}';) is a single line, there's quite a bit going on here so let's break it down a bit.

The first concept in use here is string interpolation. This lets us access the value of a variable or expression inside of a string using ${expression}. For example:

String x = 'hello';
String y = 'world';
print('${x} ${y}!');  // prints "hello world!"

Next, Dart lets us access the characters in a string by position (starting at position 0) using the variable name followed by the position enclosed in []. So input[0] gives us the first character of the input string which is what we need to capitalize. We do this be applying the toUpperCase method to that character and return the result with string interpolation as mentioned before.

Now all we need to do is append the remainder of our original string without the first character. We can do this with the substring method.

String substring (int startIndex, [int endIndex])

Applying substring with a start index of 1 and no end index returns everything expect for the first character since substring, like the [] index, starts with the first character being position 0. By again wrapping this with string interpolation we've now returned the full string with the first character capitalized which will get printed from the main() function's print() statement.

How to Run the Solution

To run the Dart capitalize program, download the dart file from GitHub, install the Dart SDK as described at dart.dev, and run the following from the command line:

dart capitalize.dart "string to be capitalized"

Alternatively, you can copy the source code into DartPad, an online Dart interpreter. Just keep in mind that you won't have access to the command line arguments or stdin and stdout using this method so you'll have to populate the args variable in the code instead. For example: