It’s common to name your database columns like this_is_a_column with what I call “underscore case”. It’s also twice as common to name variables in your code with either CamelCaseFormat or mixedCaseFormat. I hate the tedious effort of going between the two, so here is a snippet of python that does the work for me.
It works by passing a column name to a transform function that processes it through a regular expression. That regular expression passes the matched groups through a helper function before putting it all back together again.
[python]
import re
def toMixedCase(columnName):
""" pass 'a_column_name' get back 'aColumnName' """
return re.sub("(_[a-zA-Z])",toMixedCaseHelper,columnName)
def toMixedCaseHelper(match):
""" pass a match of '_a' and you get back 'A' """
return match.group(0)[1].upper()
def toUnderscoreCase(columnName):
""" pass 'aColumnName' and get back 'a_column_name' """
return re.sub("([a-z][A-Z])",toUnderscoreCaseHelper,columnName)
def toUnderscoreCaseHelper(match):
""" pass a match of 'aZ' and get back 'a_z' """
return match.group(0)[0] + '_'+match.group(0)[1].lower()
[/python]
Now let’s see it at work:
>>> import caseTransformations
>>> caseTransformations.toMixedCase("your_column_name")
'yourColumnName'
>>> caseTransformations.toUnderscoreCase("yourMixedCaseName")
'your_mixed_case_name'
Beautiful.
It might not be perfect, and you could speed it up by pre-compiling the regular expressions, but I’m happy with it (and open to suggestions of a better implementation)