Cases

A string case is the pair of a pattern which describes how individual words are cased and of a delimiter, a string that joines words together.

Below is a summary of cases used in programming languages and written language, as described by their pattern and delimiter.

pattern	underscore _	hyphen -	no delimiter	space
lower	snake_case	kebab-case	flatcase	lower case
upper	CONSTANT_CASE	COBOL-CASE	UPPERFLATCASE	UPPER CASE
capital	Ada_Case	Train-Case	PascalCase	Title Case
camel			camelCase

Other Cases

We can also consider space as a delimiter. In the context of programming languages, spaces are almost universally used to distiguish tokens from one another, meaning you couldn’t use a space as part of an identifier.

We might still prepare an identifier for printing to an end user or logging to a file. In the formatting sense, considering space as a delimiter is useful. We can give these names as well.

pattern	space
lower	lower case
upper	UPPER CASE
capital	Title Case

We also can consider the sentence pattern. With a space delimiter, this describes how many languages case sentences by capitalizing the first word.

pattern	space
sentence	Sentence case

Sentence pattern used with other delimiters might also be seen used. Many computer users might name files following a case that uses sentence pattern with underscores or hypthens as delimiters. These cases do not have a common name, as far as the author is aware.

Non-Cases

Some “cases” are either not practical for programming or break the formal definition of a case. These transformations still depend on the word-by-word or letter-by-letter transformations of case. They are niche.

name	example
alternating	aLtErNaTiNg CaSe
random	ranDom CAsE
toggle	tOGGLE cASE
surreal	s u r r e a l c a s e

Furthermore, if we consider the idea of prefixes and suffixes, some programming languages that use symbols to prefix identifiers sometimes consider those identifiers to follow a different case. For example, Python PEP 0008 defines a list of conventions, some of which we would define as cases, along with names for identifiers with underscore prefixes, such as __double_leading_underscore and single_trailing_underscore_.