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Vonnegut Imperative: Replace semicolons with periods * correct *

This question is a bit shy, but I'm also very curious about the correct and clean way to do this.

Background: Kurt Vonnegut said that semicolons are useless punctuation points. All they do is show that you went to college.

Anyway, I know that if I have a text file (like "test.txt") with a bunch of useless semicolons separating "closely related" sentences, I can find and replace:

sed 's/;/./g' <test.txt >better.txt

Which will replace all those annoying half-columns with periods. However, now I have a problem that all new periods are followed by words without the first letter with a capital letter (since one word is not used after the comma).

Is there a way (hopefully via sed) to automatically replace all semicolons in a text file with periods AND also automatically capitalize the first letter of words after newly inserted periods?

Thanks hft

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Short answer. Yes of course.

Here's an example using GNU sed

:

$ echo "hello;world;i;am;here" | sed 's/;\(.\)/.\U\1/g'
hello.World.I.Am.Here


For the standard case of semi-column prose followed by the use of space:

$ echo " Hello; world; blah" | sed 's/; *\(.\)/. \U\1/g'
Hello. World. Blah
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