String Style
Text is hard. Ascii is fairly straightforward, but Unicode is hard, and UTF-8 is NOT Ascii. Styling your text is hard too. Markdown is supposed to be simple and hopefully transportable, but …
And that doesn’t even get into how you type out an identifier, even if you’re using ASCII. Most (all?) languages use a space as a separator, so if you want a variable for the number of words in a paragraph you can’t use “number of words”. That makes sense. So eliminating spaces is a common pattern.
But there’s no one way to eliminate spaces. You could just drop them, or you could replace them. Or keep them? But what do you replace them with? An underscore is a common replacement, and sometimes, but not always, you can use a dash. And what about letter case?
For your pleasure, a list of possible string cases
|
Name/Example |
Description |
|
flatcase |
Remove the spaces and don’t capitalize anything |
|
UPPERFLATCASE |
Remove the spaces. Capitalize everything |
|
camelCase |
Remove the spaces. Capitalize the first letter of all but the first word |
|
PascalCase |
Remove the spaces. Capitalize the first letter of all the words |
|
snake_case |
Replace the spaces with underscores. Don’t capitalize anything |
|
camel_Snake_Case |
Replace the spaces with underscores. Capitalize the first letter of all but the first word |
|
Pascal_Snake_Case |
Replace the spaces with underscores. Capitalize the first letter of all the words |
|
SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE. |
Replace the spaces with underscores. Capitalize everything |
|
kebab-case |
Replace the spaces with dashes. Don’t capitalize anything |
|
camel-Kebab-Case |
Replace the spaces with dashes. Capitalize the first letter of all but the word |
|
Pascal-Kebab-Case |
Replace the spaces with dashes. Capitalize the first letter of all the words |
|
SCREAMING-KEBAB-CASE. |
Replace the spaces with dashes. Capitalize everything |
Given all of those options, which do you choose? First and foremost, use whatever is in the file you’re editing. After that, use one of our style guides (C++, Go, Python). Then listen to your language and it’s style. And whatever you do, don’t use StUdLYcaPSfOrAnythinG
