From: Nikolai Weibull <now@...>
Date: 2011-03-24T23:03:13+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:35549] Re: [Feature #2350](Rejected) Unicode specific functionality on String in 1.9

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 18:30, Cezary <cezary.baginski@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 09:52:27PM +0900, Nikolai Weibull wrote:

>> My point is that the current #upcase (and similar methods) is
>> basically useless for anything other than ASCII.

> I would probably go one step further and disallow upcase and friends
> for any non-US-ASCII string for this reason. At least issue a warning.

For Unicode there actually are well-defined casing rules.

> For example, in German, you may want a more meaningful 'to_noun'
> instead of 'capitalize'. For Japanese some may want upcase as a no-op
> and some as a hack to convert to katakana. For case insensitivity,
> probably a "normalize" method would be more descriptive.

This is perhaps true, but beside the point.

> Out of curiosity: in what specific case is utf upcase necessary?

That���s a good question.  It���s perhaps not a common operation, but text
editors and regular expression engines most likely need it.  Even if
their utility is limited, returning incorrect results is worse.