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Converting strings to upper case is tricky

While I wrote my last blog entry I remembered another curiosity about localization which I like to mention once in a while in various exciting places on the Internet. Converting strings between upper case and lower case is difficult. It is in fact so difficult that I don't think software will ever get it perfectly right.

Here is the example I like to give. The German word for street is Straße. The ß character (called Eszett or sharp S) is a curious character. It only exists in lower case form. There is no corresponding upper case character for it. So how do we capitalize the word Straße? The grammatically correct capitalization of the word Straße is STRASSE. The lower case ß character is mapped to two upper case S characters.

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