Support Case Conversion in Multiple Replace Regex Replacements

[Shae-Clark]

Would it be possible to add support for changing capitalization when using regular expressions in Multiple Replace?

I've been using Multiple Replace to clean up transcripts, mainly removing filler words like "um" & "uh."

For example, if a subtitle says:
Um, so I went home.

After removing "Um," it becomes:
so I went home.

I'd like to be able to automatically capitalize that next word so it becomes:
So I went home.

I know some regex editors support things like \u$1 to capitalize the first letter of a match, but Subtitle Edit doesn't seem to support that.

It would be really helpful to have the option to change capitalization directly in the replacement field, whether that's capitalizing the first letter or converting matched text to uppercase or lowercase.

I don't want to automatically capitalize the beginning of every subtitle, since some lines are just continuations of the previous sentence.

Thanks!

[niksedk]

Thanks for the idea! This is now in #16071. Regular expression rules in Multiple replace support these case conversion escapes in the replacement:

• \u / \l: next character to upper / lower case
• \U / \L: upper / lower case until \E (or the end)
• \\u: a literal \u

For your example:

• Find: ^(?:Um|Uh),\s*(\w)
• Replace with: \u$1

Um, so I went home. becomes So I went home.. Lines that don't start with a filler are left alone, so continuation lines keep their lowercase start. Multiple replace regex rules run in multiline mode, so ^ also matches the second line of a two-line subtitle.

It works in Batch convert's Multiple replace too. It will be in the next beta.

If you'd rather not write it into each rule, Fix Common Errors has "Fix first letter to uppercase after paragraph": run it after Multiple replace, and it capitalizes a line only when the previous one ends a sentence.