Convert text to title case AP style
«standing up to the man with a plan» becomes «Standing up to the Man With a Plan»: AP headline rules capitalize prepositions of four or more letters, such as With, and keep a, the, to and up lowercase inside the title. Free in your browser.
- Free
- Runs in your browser
- No sign-up
- Your data stays on your device
Run — free
Worked example
- Text
- standing up to the man with a plan
- Result
- Standing up to the Man With a Plan
- Input
- standing up to the man with a plan
- Title
- Standing up to the Man With a Plan
- Title case
- Standing up to the Man With a Plan
An AP-style title case converter applies the Associated Press Stylebook headline rules to any phrase without manual checking. Enter a non-empty string—news headlines, press release titles, article decks, or newsletter subject lines—and the tool capitalizes major words and prepositions of four or more letters while keeping articles, coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions of three letters or fewer lowercase, except when they open or close the title. That four-letter preposition rule is what separates AP style from generic title case: AP writes 'Standing Up to the Man With a Plan', capitalizing With, where other styles keep it lowercase.
What AP-style title case is and how the rules work
AP-style title case is the headline capitalization convention of the Associated Press Stylebook, used by newsrooms, wire services, press release distributors, and most marketing teams that write for journalists. The rules are precise. Always capitalize the first and the last word of the title, no matter what part of speech they are.
Capitalize all major words: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and every verb including the short forms is, are, was, and be that generic converters sometimes wrongly lowercase. Lowercase only three classes of words when they appear in the middle of the title: the articles a, an, and the; the coordinating conjunctions and, but, or, nor, for, yet, and so; and prepositions of three letters or fewer, such as as, at, by, in, of, on, to, up, per, and via.
The signature AP rule is about prepositions of four or more letters: with, from, into, onto, over, than, upon, amid, about, above, under, and through are all capitalized, which is why AP headlines read 'Walking Through the Park With You' rather than 'Walking through the Park with You'. This converter applies exactly that policy. Hyphenated compounds are split on the hyphen and each segment follows the same rule independently, so 'state-of-the-art' becomes 'State-of-the-Art'.
Leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed and internal runs of spaces collapse to one, so pasted multi-line headlines normalize cleanly.
Practical tips, limits, and when AP style is the right choice
Use this capability when the target is AP headline style: news headlines, press releases, PR distribution services, media kits, and newsletter subject lines that must read like wire copy. The search intent convert text to title case AP style is exactly what this tool serves. Keep intentional brand spellings in mind: pure AP title casing rewrites iPhone-style mid-word capitals because the algorithm normalizes after the first letter, so post-edit trademark tokens or apply the tool only to the surrounding phrase.
Know what this tool is not: it is not a Chicago Manual of Style converter, which lowercases all prepositions regardless of length; it is not sentence case, which capitalizes only the first word of a paragraph; and it is not a slug generator that replaces spaces with hyphens. If your house style follows Chicago or APA, use a generic small-word title case converter instead—the difference shows precisely on with, from, into, over, and than.
When teaching style guides, run the same phrase through AP and generic converters side by side so students can see the four-letter preposition rule in action instead of memorizing an abstract list.
What you can do with it
Press release and news headline normalization
PR teams paste draft headlines in any case; one call returns AP-style capitalization that wire services and newsroom editors expect before distribution.
Editorial CMS enforcement
Newsroom CMS pipelines title-case article headlines on save, guaranteeing every published headline follows the AP four-letter preposition rule.
FAQ
What is AP-style title case?
The Associated Press headline convention: capitalize the first and last word plus all major words, and lowercase only articles, coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions of three letters or fewer in the middle of the title.
How is AP style different from generic title case?
AP capitalizes prepositions of four or more letters (with, from, into, over, than) and capitalizes short verbs such as is and are. Generic small-word converters usually keep all of those lowercase.
Which words stay lowercase in AP style?
Mid-title: the articles a, an, the; the conjunctions and, but, or, nor, for, yet, so; and prepositions of three letters or fewer such as as, at, by, in, of, on, to, up, per, via.
What happens on empty input?
Successful responses always include a non-empty AP title-cased result.
Is the AP title case converter free?
The browser tool is free and runs locally.
Related tools
For developers — API access
Everything on this page is available programmatically. This section is for teams who want to wire it into their own systems; everyone else can just use the tool above.
API endpoint
Prefer to automate it? One authenticated POST creates the task; the result comes back by webhook or a signed link. The same capability also runs here on the web, by email and from Telegram — and soon from our app too.
Call it from your stack
curl -X POST https://api.kit.forhosting.com/text/title-case-style-guide \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KIT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"text":"standing up to the man with a plan"}'const res = await fetch("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/text/title-case-style-guide", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.KIT_KEY}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json"
},
body: JSON.stringify({
"text": "standing up to the man with a plan"
})
});
const { task_id } = await res.json();import os, requests
res = requests.post(
"https://api.kit.forhosting.com/text/title-case-style-guide",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['KIT_KEY']}"},
json={
"text": "standing up to the man with a plan"
},
)
task_id = res.json()["task_id"]<?php
$res = file_get_contents("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/text/title-case-style-guide", false, stream_context_create([
"http" => [
"method" => "POST",
"header" => "Authorization: Bearer " . getenv("KIT_KEY") . "\r\nContent-Type: application/json",
"content" => '{"text":"standing up to the man with a plan"}',
],
]));
$task = json_decode($res, true);body := bytes.NewBufferString(`{"text":"standing up to the man with a plan"}`)
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.kit.forhosting.com/text/title-case-style-guide", body)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("KIT_KEY"))
req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
res, _ := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)Example request
{
"text": "standing up to the man with a plan"
}Example response
{
"task_id": "tsk_a1b2c3d4e5f6a1b2c3d4e5f6",
"type": "text.title_case_style_guide",
"status": "queued",
"_links": {
"result": "/tasks/tsk_…/result"
}
}The API is asynchronous: the call returns a task_id immediately and the result arrives by webhook. Polling is capped at 1 req/s per task.
Pricing
Published price — no tokens, no invented credits. A failed task is never charged.
Limits
max_chars | 100000 |
Errors
| HTTP | Code | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
401 | unauthorized | Missing or invalid API key. |
402 | insufficient_balance | Your balance doesn't cover the task price. |
404 | unknown_type | That task type doesn't exist. |
429 | rate_limited | Too many requests. Use the webhook instead of polling. |
Technical notes
Empty or whitespace-only input is rejected with a clear invalid_input error so automated pipelines never publish a blank headline as a success.
What AP-style title case is and how the rules work
Input that is empty after trimming is refused with invalid_input instead of returning an empty string that would masquerade as a successful conversion in logs and CMS hooks.
How to call the API and what the response contains
Feed the raw phrase instead of pre-capitalizing by hand: the converter normalizes letter case after the first alphabetic character of each word, so ALL CAPS paste and mixed Case paste converge on the same AP title. Send a JSON body with a required string field text; the aliases input, value, string, and s are also accepted. The value must be a non-empty string after whitespace is trimmed and must not exceed one hundred thousand characters, so a single request cannot exhaust Worker or browser memory on a huge paste. On success the response echoes input as the original string you sent, text as the trimmed working string, result as the AP title-cased output, title and title_case as the same string under alternate names for callers that prefer those keys, style as the literal value ap so downstream systems can record which convention was applied, word_count as the number of whitespace-separated tokens after normalization, and message as a short English summary reporting how many words were converted. Failed validation—a missing text field, a non-string value, an oversize payload, or content that is empty after trimming—returns invalid_input and is never charged. Pricing is a flat $0.002 per successful request with unit item and zero marginal unit price.
Practical tips, limits, and when AP style is the right choice
Round-trip checks for tests are easy: feed 'standing up to the man with a plan' and expect 'Standing Up to the Man With a Plan'—note that to and a stay lowercase while With rises because it has four letters; feed a single short word and expect only its first letter raised; deliberately send an empty string or spaces to confirm invalid_input fires with a message asking for a non-empty string. Failed tasks that return invalid_input do not consume prepaid balance, which keeps form validation and CI negative tests cheap.
Integration use cases
Style-guide testing and training
Journalism courses and QA suites generate known-good AP fixtures and assert that empty submissions raise invalid_input in CI.