.title() - annoying mistake

[Avi Gross]

Speaking for myself, I am beyond tired of this topic, however informative
parts have been.

I will say it is irrational to try to impose rationally across all possible
languages, let alone people like me who often combine 3 or more language in
a single sentence when talking to others like myself with a dynamic to
nonsensical grammar. Try capitalizing someone's name when they insist on
being known by a purely numerical name like 7777..., or just 7 of 9 or even
!@zq. 

So, yes, a purist might want a truly comprehensive piece of code larger than
say all the code in Microsoft WORD, that first figures out what language
might be used and uses locale and guesswork to even try to narrow down that
the words are meant to be treated as they are in Bavaria and see if the use
is informal or say adhering to the rules for submitting in APA format or
whatever. We are talking about an extremely hard problem that will still
likely make mistakes if I am from Bavaria but submitting a science fiction
article mimicking what I imagine might be the way it will be written in
3010.

So I suggest we take the source for the title function and rename it
something enlightening like changeCaseRandomMethod42dInitialUpperElseLower()
so it can be used mysteriously by anyone that wants. Then deprecate the use
of title() while keeping that as some form of alias for the fantastic new
name. Anyone wishing to have title mean anything else, feel free to redefine
it.

But that jokingly does not mean there is no room for improvement. As an
example, people often would like words like "FBI" to be left alone and not
changed to "Fbi" or in some other contexts, not be flagged as a spelling
error let alone corrected. I suspect the same or relate functions might
accept an optional arguments like maintainAllCAPS=TRUE so FBI is left alone,
albeit LOTUS123 might become Lotus123 or not.

I have seen setups where a programmer makes every imaginable function they
can think of but at some later point, some profiling of actual usage shows
that 80% of them are NEVER used. Often, that is because nobody reads all the
documentation to find out if it even exists or there is a simple workaround.
If the only thing bothering you is that a small list of words like FBI comes
out wrong, it is simple enough to write a function that post-processes the
result of title() and changes those words back.

If you designed a brand new language core today, you may indeed want to
leave title() out of the core but include it as an optional module, perhaps
with a more descriptive name.

Tell me if the base should have functions called camelCase(), PascalCase(),
arrayHungarianCase() or underscore_case() ????


-----Original Message-----
From: Python-list <python-list-bounces+avigross=verizon.net at python.org> On
Behalf Of Christian Gollwitzer
Sent: Monday, March 22, 2021 4:21 PM
To: python-list at python.org
Subject: Re: .title() - annoying mistake

Am 22.03.21 um 16:03 schrieb Robert Latest:
> Chris Angelico wrote:
>> Cool thing is, nobody in Python needs to maintain anything here.
> 
> That's great because I'm actually having trouble with sending log 
> messages over the socket conection you helped me with, would you mind
having a look?

You misunderstood the "here".

(native German as well, but I think it means "for keeping .title() up to
date)

I agree with Chris that .title() can be useful for "title-casing" a single
character, whatever that means. It should be documented, though, that it is
not suitable to title-case a string, not even in English.

	Christian
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