Inserting Soft Hyphens into a String Just Before Capital Letters
I am currently working on a open source project that involves the display of lots of .NET file names within flexible tiles (the tiles are sized based on the display). It is a pretty common scenario to have reasonably long file names that won’t fit nicely on a tile.
For example, CustomerEntitlementRepository.cs needs a pretty big tile.
This can be solved rather clumsily by using CSS word-wrap:
word-wrap: break-word;
This will split whole words as needed to make things fit, but it loses a lot of readability, which would make these tiles less useful.
A much better way to split the words would be if they would break on whole words, i.e. “Customer”, “Entitlement”, “Repository”. But of course, they aren’t whole words – because there are no spaces.
So the solution is to insert soft-hyphens:
Customer­Entitlement­Repository.cs
Soft hyphens only appear when they are needed, so when there is enough room, you’ll see:
CustomerEntitlementRepository.cs
And when there isn’t enough room, you’ll see a variation such as:
CustomerEntitlement- Repository.cs
To insert these soft hyphens automatically with C#, you can use this regular expression:
Regex.Replace(fileName, @"((?<=\p{Ll})\p{Lu})|((?!\A)\p{Lu}(?>\p{Ll}))", "­$0");