Species Name Capitalization with Apply (Loops)

You have some data with species names that are stored in capital letters. You want to capitalize them properly so that the genus starts with a capital letter and the other letters are lower case. The str_to_sentence function from the stringr package can do this:

library(stringr)

species <- "CYGNUS OLOR"
species_clean <- str_to_sentence(species)

1. Use sapply and str_to_sentence to produce a vector of properly capitalized species names from the following vector of species names:

species <- c("CYGNUS OLOR", "AIX SPONSA", "ANAS ACUTA")

2. Replace sapply with lapply to get the answer as a list instead of a vector.

3. Use lapply to get the properly capitalized species and the use unlist to convert the result to a vector.

Note: this exercise doesn’t technically require the use of an apply function, but we’re going to use one to keep our first use of apply simple.