Capitalize the Title - Practice Coding Problems

Capitalize the Title - Problem

String Easy

You are given a string title consisting of one or more words separated by a single space, where each word consists of English letters. Capitalize the string by changing the capitalization of each word such that:

If the length of the word is 1 or 2 letters, change all letters to lowercase.
Otherwise, change the first letter to uppercase and the remaining letters to lowercase.

Return the capitalized title.

Input & Output

Example 1 — Mixed Case Input

$ Input: title = "capiTalIze tHe titLe"

› Output: "Capitalize The Title"

💡 Note: "capiTalIze" has 10 letters (>2) → "Capitalize", "tHe" has 3 letters (>2) → "The", "titLe" has 5 letters (>2) → "Title"

Example 2 — Short Words

$ Input: title = "First leTTeR of EACH Word"

› Output: "First of Each Word"

💡 Note: "First" → "First" (5 letters), "leTTeR" → "Letter" (6 letters), "of" → "of" (2 letters, stays lowercase), "EACH" → "Each" (4 letters), "Word" → "Word" (4 letters)

Example 3 — Very Short Words

$ Input: title = "i lOve Y"

› Output: "i love y"

💡 Note: All words have ≤2 letters: "i" (1 letter) → "i", "lOve" (4 letters) → "Love", "Y" (1 letter) → "y"

Constraints

1 ≤ title.length ≤ 100
title consists of words separated by a single space without leading or trailing spaces
Each word consists of uppercase and lowercase English letters only

Visualization

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Understanding the Visualization

Input

String with mixed capitalization

Process

Apply length-based capitalization rules

Output

Properly capitalized title

Key Takeaway

🎯 Key Insight: Word length determines the capitalization rule - short words (≤2) stay lowercase, longer words get title case

Asked in

🍎 Apple 15 M Microsoft 12

The key insight is that word length determines capitalization: words with ≤2 letters become lowercase, longer words become title case. Best approach is to split by spaces and process each word individually. Time: O(n), Space: O(n)

Common Approaches

Approach	Time	Space	Notes
✓ Split and Process Words	O(n)	O(n)	Split string into words, apply rules to each word, then join back
Character-by-Character Processing	O(n)	O(1)	Process each character individually while tracking word boundaries

Split and Process Words — Algorithm Steps

Step 1: Split the title string by spaces to get individual words
Step 2: For each word, check if length ≤ 2 or > 2
Step 3: Apply lowercase for short words, title case for long words
Step 4: Join all processed words with spaces

Visualization

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Step-by-Step Walkthrough

Split Words

Divide string into individual words

Check Length

For each word, determine if length ≤ 2 or > 2

Apply Rules

Short words: lowercase, Long words: title case

Code -

solution.c — C

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <ctype.h>

char* solution(char* title) {
    if (!title || strlen(title) == 0) {
        char* result = malloc(1);
        result[0] = '\0';
        return result;
    }
    
    int len = strlen(title);
    char* result = malloc(len + 1);
    strcpy(result, title);
    
    int i = 0;
    while (i < len) {
        if (result[i] == ' ') {
            i++;
            continue;
        }
        
        // Find word boundaries
        int wordStart = i;
        while (i < len && result[i] != ' ') {
            i++;
        }
        
        int wordLength = i - wordStart;
        
        // Apply capitalization rules
        if (wordLength <= 2) {
            for (int j = wordStart; j < wordStart + wordLength; j++) {
                result[j] = tolower(result[j]);
            }
        } else {
            result[wordStart] = toupper(result[wordStart]);
            for (int j = wordStart + 1; j < wordStart + wordLength; j++) {
                result[j] = tolower(result[j]);
            }
        }
    }
    
    return result;
}

int main() {
    char title[1000];
    fgets(title, sizeof(title), stdin);
    title[strcspn(title, "\n")] = 0;
    
    char* result = solution(title);
    printf("%s\n", result);
    free(result);
    
    return 0;
}

Time & Space Complexity

Time Complexity

⏱️

O(n)

Single pass to split words plus processing each character once

✓ Linear Growth

Space Complexity

O(n)

Array to store individual words and result string

⚡ Linearithmic Space

25.0K Views

Medium Frequency

~5 min Avg. Time

850 Likes

Ln 1, Col 1

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Input & Output

Constraints

Visualization

Related Problems

Common Approaches

Split and Process Words — Algorithm Steps

Visualization

Code -

Time & Space Complexity

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