From: "rpardee@..." <rpardee@...>
Date: 2005-10-08T07:46:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Code for title-casing (US) snail addresses?

And thanks again!

If I can beg your indulgence a bit further... I'm having trouble
elaborating this so it does the right thing for street names like
'McGrath'.  The simpler version is:

def prettify(address)
   abbreviations  = %w(PO NE NW SE SW)
   prefixes2      = %w(Mc O' D')
   prefixes3      = %w(Mac)
   address.gsub!(/(\d)([A-Z]+)/) { $1 + $2.downcase }
   address.gsub(/[A-Z]+/) do |w|
      # abbreviations.include?(w) ? w :  w.capitalize
      if abbreviations.include?(w) then
         w
      else
         w.capitalize
      end
   end
end

Which works admirably, except it gives back "Mcgrath", rather than
"McGrath".

I *thought* I'd be able to tack a second Array.include? on there, like
so:

def prettify(address)
   abbreviations  = %w(PO NE NW SE SW)
   prefixes2      = %w(Mc O' D')
   prefixes3      = %w(Mac)
   address.gsub!(/(\d)([A-Z]+)/) { $1 + $2.downcase }
   address.gsub(/[A-Z]+/) do |w|
      # abbreviations.include?(w) ? w :  w.capitalize
      if abbreviations.include?(w) then
         w
      else
         w.capitalize
      end
      if prefixes2.include?(w[0..1]) then
         w[2..2] = w[2..2].upcase
      end
   end
end

But when I do that, calls like prettify("20 E MCGRAW ST") just return
"20"

I've read over the gsub docs, but don't see why the above does not work
as expected.  Anybody got a clue for me?

Thanks!

-Roy