Titlecasing a string with exceptions

There are these methods:

>>> mytext = u'i am a foobar bazbar'
>>> print mytext.capitalize()
I am a foobar bazbar
>>> print mytext.title()
I Am A Foobar Bazbar

There's no lowercase article option. You'd have to code that yourself, probably by using a list of articles you want to lower.

Use the titlecase.py module! Works only for English.

>>> from titlecase import titlecase
>>> titlecase('i am a foobar bazbar')
'I Am a Foobar Bazbar'

GitHub: https://github.com/ppannuto/python-titlecase

There are a few problems with this. If you use split and join, some white space characters will be ignored. The built-in capitalize and title methods do not ignore white space.

>>> 'There     is a way'.title()
'There     Is A Way'

If a sentence starts with an article, you do not want the first word of a title in lowercase.

Keeping these in mind:

import re 
def title_except(s, exceptions):
    word_list = re.split(' ', s)       # re.split behaves as expected
    final = [word_list[0].capitalize()]
    for word in word_list[1:]:
        final.append(word if word in exceptions else word.capitalize())
    return " ".join(final)

articles = ['a', 'an', 'of', 'the', 'is']
print title_except('there is a    way', articles)
# There is a    Way
print title_except('a whim   of an elephant', articles)
# A Whim   of an Elephant