How to capitalize the first letter in a String in Ruby

My version:

class String
    def upcase_first
        return self if empty?
        dup.tap {|s| s[0] = s[0].upcase }
    end
    def upcase_first!
        replace upcase_first
    end
end

['NASA title', 'MHz', 'sputnik'].map &:upcase_first  #=> ["NASA title", "MHz", "Sputnik"]

Check also:
https://www.rubydoc.info/gems/activesupport/5.0.0.1/String%3Aupcase_first
https://www.rubydoc.info/gems/activesupport/5.0.0.1/ActiveSupport/Inflector#upcase_first-instance_method

Below is another way to capitalize each word in a string. \w doesn't match Cyrillic characters or Latin characters with diacritics but [[:word:]] does. upcase, downcase, capitalize, and swapcase didn't apply to non-ASCII characters until Ruby 2.4.0 which was released in 2016.

"aAa-BBB ä мария _a a_a".gsub(/\w+/,&:capitalize)
=> "Aaa-Bbb ä мария _a A_a"
"aAa-BBB ä мария _a a_a".gsub(/[[:word:]]+/,&:capitalize)
=> "Aaa-Bbb Ä Мария _a A_a"

[[:word:]] matches characters in these categories:

Ll (Letter, Lowercase)
Lu (Letter, Uppercase)
Lt (Letter, Titlecase)
Lo (Letter, Other)
Lm (Letter, Modifier)
Nd (Number, Decimal Digit)
Pc (Punctuation, Connector)

[[:word:]] matches all 10 of the characters in the "Punctuation, Connector" (Pc) category:

005F _ LOW LINE
203F ‿ UNDERTIE
2040 ⁀ CHARACTER TIE
2054 ⁔ INVERTED UNDERTIE
FE33 ︳ PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL LOW LINE
FE34 ︴ PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL WAVY LOW LINE
FE4D ﹍ DASHED LOW LINE
FE4E ﹎ CENTRELINE LOW LINE
FE4F ﹏ WAVY LOW LINE
FF3F ＿ FULLWIDTH LOW LINE

This is another way to only convert the first character of a string to uppercase:

"striNG".sub(/./,&:upcase)
=> "StriNG"