Antoine Pitrou <pit...@free.fr> added the comment: > While > the change would seem to always be helpful in an English context, in > French the proper title casing of "l'argent" is "L'Argent".
Well I think even in English it doesn't work right. For example someone named O'Brien would end up as "O'brien". My point is that capitalization is both language-sensitive and context-sensitive, and it's a hard problem for a computer to solve. Since str.title() can only be a very crude approximation of the right thing, there's no good reason to break backwards compatibility, IMO. > 1. Leave everything the same (rejecting requests for apostrophe handling > and forever live with the likes of You'Re). > > 2. Handle embedded single apostrophes, fixing most cases in English, and > wreaking havoc on the French (who are going to be ill-served under any > scenario). > > 3. Add an optional argument to str.title() with a list of characters > that will not trigger a transition. This lets people add apostrophes > and hyphens and other characters of interest. Hyphens are hard because > cases like mother-in-law should properly be converted to Mother-in_Law > and hyphens get used in many odd ways. > > 4. Add a new string method for handling title case with embedded > apostrophes but leaving the old version unchanged. > > My order of preferences is 2,4,3,1. I really think the only reasonable options are 3 and 1. 2 breaks compatibility with no real benefit. 4 is too specific a variation (especially in the unicode case, where you might want to take into account the different variants of apostrophes and other characters), and adding a new method for such a subtle difference is not warranted. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue7008> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
