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A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase

#131

Post by rty32 »

beeboobaa3 wrote: post #122
SleepyMyroslav wrote: post #73

In gamedev there is simple rule: don't try to do any of that. If it is text game needs to show to user then every version of the text that is needed is a translated text. Programmer will never know if context or locale will need word order changes or anything complicated. Just trust the translation team. If text is coming from user - then change design until its not needed to 'convert'. There are major issues just to…

> There are major issues just to show user back what he entered! Because the font for editing and displayed text could be different. Not even mentioning RTL and other issues. Your web browser is doing it right now as you are reading this comment.

And web development is not game development? And chances are that games don't ship chromium with them?

Re: A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase

#132

Post by hinkley »

crazygringo wrote: post #116
vardump wrote: post #2

As always, Raymond is right. (And as usually, I could guess it's him before even clicking the link.) That said, 99% time when doing upper- or lowercase operation you're interested just in the 7-bit ASCII range of characters. For the remaining 1%, there's ICU library. Just like Raymond Chen mentioned.

> That said, 99% time when doing upper- or lowercase operation you're interested just in the 7-bit ASCII range of characters. I think it's more the exact opposite. The only times I'm dealing with 7-bit ASCII is for internal identifiers like variable names or API endpoints. Which is a lot of the time, but I can't ever think of when I've needed my code to change their case. It might literally be never. On the other han…

And you could argue that if the internal identifiers need to be capitalized or lower-cased, you've already lost.

On an enterprise app these little string manipulations are a drop in the bucket. In a game they might not be. Sort that stuff out at compile time, or commit time.

Re: A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase

#134

Post by Kwpolska »

thiht wrote: post #70
zarzavat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different parts of a string can be in different languages too[1]. The lowercase of "DON'T FUSS ABOUT FUSSBALL" is "don't fuss about fußball". Unless you're in Switzerland. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

I thought the German language deprecated the use of ß years ago, no? I learned German for a year and that's what the teacher told us, but maybe it's not the whole story

The Swiss have dropped ß, but it's still a thing in Germany or Austria.

Re: A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase

#135

Post by Kwpolska »

mkayokay wrote: post #26
cyxxon wrote: post #17

Small nitpick: the example "LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S (“ß” U+00DF) uppercases to the two-character sequence “SS”:³ Straße ⇒ STRASSE" is slightly wrong, it seems to me, as we now do actually have a uppercase version of that, so it should uppercase to "Latin Capital Letter Sharp S" (U+1E9E). The double-S thing is still widely used, though.

Duden mentions this: "Bei Verwendung von Großbuchstaben steht traditionellerweise SS für ß. In manchen Schriften gibt es aber auch einen entsprechenden Großbuchstaben; seine Verwendung ist fakultativ ‹§ 25 E3›." But isn't it also dependent on the available glyphs in the font used? So f.e. it needs to be ensured that U+1E9E exists?

I don't think there exists any code that makes uppercasing decisions based on the selected font. Besides, if it doesn't exist in the current font, there's probably a fallback font.

Re: A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase

#136

Post by wslh »

blenderob wrote: post #3

It is issues like this due to which I gave up on C++. There are so many ways to do something and every way is freaking wrong! An acceptable solution is given at the end of the article: > If you use the International Components for Unicode (ICU) library, you can use u_strToUpper and u_strToLower. Makes you wonder why this isn't part of the C++ standard library itself. Every revision of the C++ standard brings with its…

Me too, how is case conversion perfectly done in modern languages such as Zig [1], Rust, or Swift?

[1] Ended up looking at https://github.com/JakubSzark/zig-string

Re: A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase

#137

Post by theelous3 »

fluoridation wrote: post #115
squeaky-clean wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For ascii in C++ isn't there std::tolower / std::toupper? If you're not dealing with unsigned char types there isn't a simple case conversion function, but that's for a good reason as the article lays out.

Those functions take and return single characters. What's missing is functions that operate on strings. You can use them in combination with std::transform(), but as the article points out, even if you're just dealing with ASCII you can easily do it wrong. I've been using C++ for over 20 years and I didn't know tolower() and toupper() were non-addressable. There's really no excuse for the library not having simple ca…

> There's really no excuse for the library not having simple case conversion functions that operate on strings in-place.

Could not agree more. Any time I touch a C I want to scoop my brain out of my ear. So many simple unbelievably common operations have fifty "best" ways to do them, when they should have one happy path 99% of usecases require baked in. Nobody should ever have to seriously consider something as ridiculous as "is tolower addressable?".

Re: A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase

#138

Post by MajimasEyepatch »

sebstefan wrote: post #37
vardump wrote: post #2

As always, Raymond is right. (And as usually, I could guess it's him before even clicking the link.) That said, 99% time when doing upper- or lowercase operation you're interested just in the 7-bit ASCII range of characters. For the remaining 1%, there's ICU library. Just like Raymond Chen mentioned.

Yes please, keep making software that mangles my actual last name at every step of the way. 99% of the world loves it when you only care about the USA.

It’s totally reasonable to assume your users are in the US if your business only sells to people in the US. I work in the health insurance sector; there’s absolutely no chance my company ever sells these products internationally. We can’t even sell them in every state.

Re: A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase

#139

Post by sumeno »

MajimasEyepatch wrote: post #138
sebstefan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes please, keep making software that mangles my actual last name at every step of the way. 99% of the world loves it when you only care about the USA.

It’s totally reasonable to assume your users are in the US if your business only sells to people in the US. I work in the health insurance sector; there’s absolutely no chance my company ever sells these products internationally. We can’t even sell them in every state.

It's not reasonable to assume that users in the US have names that only use 7-bit ASCII

Re: A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase

#140

Post by recursive »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #118
recursive wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a serious argument? Humans don't directly use HTML to communicate with each other. It's a document markup language rendered by user agents, developed against a specification.

Markup languages and SGML in particular absolutely are designed for digital text communication by humans and to be written using plain text editors; it's kindof the entire point of avoiding binary data constructs. And to GP, SGML/HTML actually has a facility to define uppercasing rules beyond ASCII, namely the LCNMSTRT, UCNMSTRT, LCNMCHAR, UCNMCHAR options in the SYNTAX NAMING section in the SGML declaration introduc…

HTML is a text-based medium. But that doesn't make it a human language. Some human languages are not text-based. And some text is not a human language.

ANSI C was designed to be written by humans using a plain text editor. That doesn't make it a human language.

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