6 ms·

.ToUpper() is locale-dependent, so can only be used if the locale of the text in question is known. E.g. German ß capitalizes to SS, and .ToUpper().ToLower() sh

by korlja 4y ago

.ToUpper() is locale-dependent, so can only be used if the locale of the text in question is known. E.g. German ß capitalizes to SS, and .ToUpper().ToLower() should give you either 'ss' or 'ß' depending on what it was before. Always outputting 'ss' is okish and readable, but actually wrong. Blindly calling .ToUpper() on anything is a typical anglo-centric mistake. Just don't use .ToUpper(), shoutcase is ugly anyways ;) See also: one of the many "100 fallacies programmers assume about natural written language" documents or such.

Hamuko 4y ago
>Blindly calling .ToUpper() on anything is a typical anglo-centric mistake. Yes, one that you might make if you were for example, trying to make English text uppercase. Which is why it would be daft for anyone to suggest that their country has two different English spellings depending on the character case.
egeozcan 4y ago
> German ß capitalizes to SS, and .ToUpper().ToLower() should give you either 'ss' or 'ß' depending on what it was before As long as there is no unicode SS character, we are into the "what color are your bits" problem or tolower needs to be language and word aware. In .NET the uppercase and lowercase functions are culture aware (with defaults to system settings, which breaks more software than you might think) but not word aware AFAIK.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  > As long as there is no unicode SS character, we are into the "what color are your bits" problem or tolower needs to be language and word aware. It turns out there is such a unicode character -- ẞ/ß -- although based on other comments here it looks like it was added fairly recently. Upper/Lower case stuff just seems to be at an annoying intersection where it has cultural and also programming significance. Or at least, people will use toUpper when they really want some case-insensitive sortable version of the string. (based on some googling, probably localeCompare is the way to go in javascript at least).
- 3836293648 4y ago
  I hate the locale nonsense. The decimal point is `.` and not `,`. The rest of this stupid country is wrong
bbu 4y ago
Only sz should use ß. Ss stays ss even in German-german. Switzerland got rid of the sz/ss distinction a long time ago. So you need to be culture and word aware to do it „right“.
- korlja 4y ago
  'sz' for 'ß' is sometimes used to make things roundtrip-proof in capslock, e.g. on military stencils. HTML calls it 'szlig'. Also, some use "Esszet" as the name of the character. But all are wrong in that ß isn't a ligature of s and z, it is a ligature of s and s. The shape of the character stems from the fact that in fractur writing and even some grotesk fonts, 's' at the end of a word was written 's', while 's' within a word was written 'ſ'. Thus the end of a word like Fuss was written Fuſs, giving a ligature of Fuß. No 'z' anywhere.
  - kmm 4y ago
    Originally ß arose as a ligature of s and z, or rather ſ and ʒ. In many older texts, or even current fonts, the second part of the ligature is indisputably a long-tailed ʒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F
  - seszett 4y ago
    > some use "Esszet" as the name of the character I believe the actual name is Eszett.
  - wanderingstan 4y ago
    Only “wrong” in light of current usage, but not historically. By this measure, the English name of “W” would be wrong because it’s not actually a “double-U” but a “double-V”. But at the time of the letter’s formation, U and V were not yet separate letters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W
    - jfk13 4y ago
      The Swedes get this "right", and call it [ˈdɵ̂bːɛlˌveː]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet
AdrianoKF 4y ago
Small nitpick: uppercase ẞ was added to Unicode 5.1 in 2007 (https://unicode-table.com/en/1E9E/ https://unicode-table.com/en/1E9E/) and is considered correct German orthography since 2017 (see §25 E3 in https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/rechtschreibung/6180#par25E3 https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/rechtschreibung/6180#par25E3)
- korlja 4y ago
  That is correct and solves the roundtrip-problem (in this case and language). But uppercase 'ẞ' is just an additional option at the discretion of the writer, the recommended variant continues to be 'SS'.
- usr1106 4y ago
  How often do you see the new letter in German everyday life? Despite being German myself I don't visit Germany that often these days, I still read a couple of German publications regularly. I have never seen the new letter outside of discussions by software people about character handling.
  - gumby 4y ago
    I assumed it was added for shop signs and product packaging (I.e. as a gimmick). Speaking of surviving Fraktur ligatures, I’m sorry that a couple of others like tz didn’t make it to Roman. It makes poor ß appear lonely.
    - AdrianoKF 4y ago
      I was actually wondering if the driving factor is legal documents. ID cards show names in all-caps letters, which creates the dilemma that your ID might not show your actual name (notwithstanding international standards for travel documents that prescribe transliteration of non-latin characters; see ICAO Doc 9303 Part 3, section 6 [0] for examples) [0]: https://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p3_cons_en.pdf https://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p3_cons_en....
      - 4y ago
d1sxeyes 4y ago
.toUpper() is a quick and mostly effective way to normalise strings for comparison if you're not sure what case the two strings to compare are in (eg: one has been input by a user). Yes, it's a shortcut, and occasionally you'll end up with a miss, but it's good enough to work 99% of the time, and the alternative is a LOT of code and data changes to handle a very small proportion of cases.
- vesinisa 4y ago
  Hmm I think you miss the point. In some programming environments (like C# and Java) .toUpper() is always incorrect in code unless you are displaying the resulting string in a UI, as it uses the "current locale", which is whatever the user has selected for the machine. When e.g. comparing strings case-insensitively, you should always explicitly specify the locale where the conversion should happen instead of relying on an external configuration variable. JavaScript actually seems to be the smart one here - its default .toUpperCase() uses the "locale-insensitive case mappings in the Unicode Character Database".
  - d1sxeyes 4y ago
    I did indeed. Thanks - yes, I was referring to JavaScript's .toUpperCase(), silly oversight and assumption on my side. Thanks for the correction!
  - greenshackle2 4y ago
    > the user has selected for the machine I don't think most Java and C# software is desktop apps? Surely in most cases it's the locale selected for the server or VM, which should be consistent? (I'm not saying it's good coding practice, mind you, but it probably ends up accidentally working in a lot of cases.)
    - vesinisa 4y ago
      You write like you can know how and where the code will get executed in the future. :) Do you think that the authors of Windows 95 ever imagined the system would one day get ported to an obscure subset of a functional scripting language (Asm.js variety of JavaScript), and get booted in a hyper-text browser running on a PDA device with internet connection (web browser on a smartphone)? Yet - here we are: https://win95.ajf.me/ https://win95.ajf.me/ > I'm not saying it's good coding practice, mind you, but it probably ends up accidentally working in most cases Fully agree. It's still bad practice and I high-five every linter that automatically flags it.
underwater 4y ago
You make a good case (ha!). What if toUpper() and toLower() were omitted from standard libraries? Usually they are used, incorrectly, to do something like string comparison, which could be better served by a more specific method.

by korlja 4y ago

Hamuko 4y ago

>Blindly calling .ToUpper() on anything is a typical anglo-centric mistake. Yes, one that you might make if you were for example, trying to make English text uppercase. Which is why it would be daft for anyone to suggest that their country has two different English spellings depending on the character case.

egeozcan 4y ago

> German ß capitalizes to SS, and .ToUpper().ToLower() should give you either 'ss' or 'ß' depending on what it was before As long as there is no unicode SS character, we are into the "what color are your bits" problem or tolower needs to be language and word aware. In .NET the uppercase and lowercase functions are culture aware (with defaults to system settings, which breaks more software than you might think) but not word aware AFAIK.

bee_rider 4y ago
> As long as there is no unicode SS character, we are into the "what color are your bits" problem or tolower needs to be language and word aware. It turns out there is such a unicode character -- ẞ/ß -- although based on other comments here it looks like it was added fairly recently. Upper/Lower case stuff just seems to be at an annoying intersection where it has cultural and also programming significance. Or at least, people will use toUpper when they really want some case-insensitive sortable version of the string. (based on some googling, probably localeCompare is the way to go in javascript at least).
3836293648 4y ago
I hate the locale nonsense. The decimal point is `.` and not `,`. The rest of this stupid country is wrong

bbu 4y ago

Only sz should use ß. Ss stays ss even in German-german. Switzerland got rid of the sz/ss distinction a long time ago. So you need to be culture and word aware to do it „right“.

korlja 4y ago
'sz' for 'ß' is sometimes used to make things roundtrip-proof in capslock, e.g. on military stencils. HTML calls it 'szlig'. Also, some use "Esszet" as the name of the character. But all are wrong in that ß isn't a ligature of s and z, it is a ligature of s and s. The shape of the character stems from the fact that in fractur writing and even some grotesk fonts, 's' at the end of a word was written 's', while 's' within a word was written 'ſ'. Thus the end of a word like Fuss was written Fuſs, giving a ligature of Fuß. No 'z' anywhere.
- kmm 4y ago
  Originally ß arose as a ligature of s and z, or rather ſ and ʒ. In many older texts, or even current fonts, the second part of the ligature is indisputably a long-tailed ʒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F
- seszett 4y ago
  > some use "Esszet" as the name of the character I believe the actual name is Eszett.
- wanderingstan 4y ago
  Only “wrong” in light of current usage, but not historically. By this measure, the English name of “W” would be wrong because it’s not actually a “double-U” but a “double-V”. But at the time of the letter’s formation, U and V were not yet separate letters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W
  - jfk13 4y ago
    The Swedes get this "right", and call it [ˈdɵ̂bːɛlˌveː]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet

AdrianoKF 4y ago

Small nitpick: uppercase ẞ was added to Unicode 5.1 in 2007 (https://unicode-table.com/en/1E9E/ https://unicode-table.com/en/1E9E/) and is considered correct German orthography since 2017 (see §25 E3 in https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/rechtschreibung/6180#par25E3 https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/rechtschreibung/6180#par25E3)

korlja 4y ago
That is correct and solves the roundtrip-problem (in this case and language). But uppercase 'ẞ' is just an additional option at the discretion of the writer, the recommended variant continues to be 'SS'.
usr1106 4y ago
How often do you see the new letter in German everyday life? Despite being German myself I don't visit Germany that often these days, I still read a couple of German publications regularly. I have never seen the new letter outside of discussions by software people about character handling.
- gumby 4y ago
  I assumed it was added for shop signs and product packaging (I.e. as a gimmick). Speaking of surviving Fraktur ligatures, I’m sorry that a couple of others like tz didn’t make it to Roman. It makes poor ß appear lonely.
  - AdrianoKF 4y ago
    I was actually wondering if the driving factor is legal documents. ID cards show names in all-caps letters, which creates the dilemma that your ID might not show your actual name (notwithstanding international standards for travel documents that prescribe transliteration of non-latin characters; see ICAO Doc 9303 Part 3, section 6 [0] for examples) [0]: https://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p3_cons_en.pdf https://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p3_cons_en....
    - 4y ago

d1sxeyes 4y ago

.toUpper() is a quick and mostly effective way to normalise strings for comparison if you're not sure what case the two strings to compare are in (eg: one has been input by a user). Yes, it's a shortcut, and occasionally you'll end up with a miss, but it's good enough to work 99% of the time, and the alternative is a LOT of code and data changes to handle a very small proportion of cases.

vesinisa 4y ago
Hmm I think you miss the point. In some programming environments (like C# and Java) .toUpper() is always incorrect in code unless you are displaying the resulting string in a UI, as it uses the "current locale", which is whatever the user has selected for the machine. When e.g. comparing strings case-insensitively, you should always explicitly specify the locale where the conversion should happen instead of relying on an external configuration variable. JavaScript actually seems to be the smart one here - its default .toUpperCase() uses the "locale-insensitive case mappings in the Unicode Character Database".
- d1sxeyes 4y ago
  I did indeed. Thanks - yes, I was referring to JavaScript's .toUpperCase(), silly oversight and assumption on my side. Thanks for the correction!
- greenshackle2 4y ago
  > the user has selected for the machine I don't think most Java and C# software is desktop apps? Surely in most cases it's the locale selected for the server or VM, which should be consistent? (I'm not saying it's good coding practice, mind you, but it probably ends up accidentally working in a lot of cases.)
  - vesinisa 4y ago
    You write like you can know how and where the code will get executed in the future. :) Do you think that the authors of Windows 95 ever imagined the system would one day get ported to an obscure subset of a functional scripting language (Asm.js variety of JavaScript), and get booted in a hyper-text browser running on a PDA device with internet connection (web browser on a smartphone)? Yet - here we are: https://win95.ajf.me/ https://win95.ajf.me/ > I'm not saying it's good coding practice, mind you, but it probably ends up accidentally working in most cases Fully agree. It's still bad practice and I high-five every linter that automatically flags it.

underwater 4y ago

You make a good case (ha!). What if toUpper() and toLower() were omitted from standard libraries? Usually they are used, incorrectly, to do something like string comparison, which could be better served by a more specific method.