Formatting of company names using all caps

API Issues
1

Hi there,

I’m indirectly a user of the Companies House API, in that it’s ingested and used as part of the Department for Education’s Get Information About Schools service.

I’ve queried with their team whether it would be possible to provide academy trust names not in all caps, but have been told that they have no control of this as it’s how the information comes from the CoHo API. Reading the API documentation it does indeed seem that company names (title) are returned in all caps.

I wondered whether you’d consider returning them in sentence case. I’d make the argument that it’s easy to convert a company name to all caps (e.g. for use in a website UI), but that it’s impossible to accurately reverse capitalisation, because of company names that use non-standard capitalisation.

Thanks,
Philip Nye

2

As far as I’m aware all company names are converted to completely upper case before they are incorporated so that’s the only version Companies House has and the only format they can be returned in. This is how it will appear on the certificate of incorporation and in the api, however you are allowed to display your company name in any format you like. So any company names using non-standard capitalisation is not something CH has access to, would be aware of etc.

Not an official answer, but I’m pretty sure this is the case.

1 Like
3

Hi, I can confirm that @ash is correct.

4

Thanks, both (and good knowledge, @ash!). I can guess the reasons, but that’s a shame.