convert Unicode to lower/uppercase?

[Martin v. Löwis]

Peter Otten <__peter__ at web.de> writes:

> While we are at it, would it be viable to "abuse" the
> encoding/decoding mechanism to do case conversions?

It might be viable, but I would consider it abuse: for one thing, I'm
not in favour of codecs which do Unicode->Unicode conversions - IMO, a
codec should convert between Unicode and byte strings. Furthermore, a
codec IMO should represent a proper "encoding", which case conversions
would not do.

Instead, it would be much better to provide such functions in a
library, e.g. by wrapping ICU. Then, case conversions should be done
locale-dependent, instead of being general (as .upper currently is).
The locale-dependent way would best operate on explicit locale
objects, so you would spell

locale_object = load_locale("German", "Plattdeutsch")
up_string = locale_object.to_upper(lower_string)

In that case, the upper-case function would stop being a string
method, and be a locale method instead, taking a string argument.

Regards,
Martin