Today I noticed that the Apache Commons libs are lacking a method to camelize Strings.

Because I needed to convert such an XML name MY_TINY_PROPERTY into a Java property name myTinyProperty, I ended up writing a simple camelizer myself.

private String toCamelCase(String value, boolean startWithLowerCase) {
	String[] strings = StringUtils.split(value.toLowerCase(), "_");
	for (int i = startWithLowerCase ? 1 : 0; i < strings.length; i++){
		strings[i] = StringUtils.capitalize(strings[i]);
	}
	return StringUtils.join(strings);
}

I guess this helpers covers most of the requirements. At least it is covering all that I need. As an alternative one could use the WordUtils#capitalizeFully() and postprocess the result.

The way back is even more difficult, because the delimiters for split() are a bit harder to determine. While many other programming languages feature a camelize and underscore method, Java (and Apache Commons) does not. Why? Should I propose a patch?