Initials of a name

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I'm stuck, so please tell me how to print the initials of a name (for ex E C for Eric Cartman).
If you could suggest a website related to string handling then that would be much appreciated too.
Thanks!

2

just delete all uncapitalised characters:

echo "Eric Cartman" | sed "s/[a-z]//g"
3

Thanks. But that seems like some sort of shortcut for the actual problem. If the name is given all lowercase then what? Dont consider it a name at all actually. Just print first letter of all words in an input line. It would be a shell script that way.
Anyone?

4

It would be nice to know what context you are trying to do this in. As has been suggested, if you have a file of first and last names, just run a sed across the file. However, if you have a string, or two tokens, as a part of a loop in a programme, then the answer will be different. As an example, if you are working in ksh or bash this is much more efficient than running sed for each individual string:

full_name="Eric Clapton"
initials="${full_name//[a-z]/}"
echo "$full_name -> $initials"

If you need E.C. or E. C. you can do something like this:

echo "${initials/ /.}."
echo "${initials/ /. }."

---------- Post updated at 11:23 ---------- Previous update was at 11:16 ----------

Crossed posts with you...

Again, if you're using a Ksh like shell language, then you could just echo out the first characters like this:

full_name="Eric Clapton"
last="${full_name#* }"
echo  "${full_name:0:1} ${last:0:1}"