Thanks all for the helpful responses. Since we seem to have some real Unicode-knowledge people here, I'd like to repost a question I had asked elsewhere awhile back, but didn't get an answer:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Can someone explain how folding-case differs from lower-case and why it should be used for case-insensitive matching instead of lower-case? I was looking at this document, but still don't get it: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr21/tr21-5.html The only part I see that directly addresses that is this: Case-folding is more than just conversion to lowercase. For example, it handles cases such as the Greek sigma, so that "?????" and "????S" will match correctly. Which references what it says earlier about sigma: Characters may also have different case mappings, depending on the context. For example, U+03A3 "S" capital sigma lowercases to U+03C3 "s" small sigma if it is followed by another letter, but lowercases to U+03C2 "?" small final sigma if it is not. But I still don't see how that demonstrates a need for anything other than toLower provided that the given toLower routine is already properly handling the "end of word"/"not end of word" difference. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unless, it's just extra speed due to not having to handle things like the "end of word"/"not end of word" difference? BTW, if those characters don't show up right on the newsgroup, the original quesion (where they are showing up right, at least for me) is here: http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango/forums/topic/782
