Re: Dealing with Georgian capitalization in programming languages

On 10/2/2018 12:45 AM, Martin J. Dürst via Unicode wrote:
> capitalize: uppercase (or title-case) the first character of the
> string, lowercase the rest
>
>
> When I say "cause problems", I mean producing mixed-case output. I
> originally thought that 'capitalize' would be fine. It is fine for
> lowercase input: I stays lowercase because Unicode Data indicates that
> titlecase for lowercase Georgian letters is the letter itself. But it
> will produce the apparently undesirable Mixed Case for ALL UPPERCASE
> input.
>
> My questions here are:
> - Has this been considered when Georgian Mtavruli was discussed in the
>   UTC?
>
Not explicitly, that I recall. The whole issue of titlecasing came up
very late in the preparation of case mapping tables for Mtavruli and
Mkhedruli for 11.0.

But it seems to me that the problem you are citing can be avoided if you
simply rethink what your "capitalize" means. It really should be
conceived of as first lowercasing the *entire* string, and then
titlecasing the *eligible* letters -- i.e., usually the first letter.
(Note that this allows for the concept that titlecasing might then be
localized on a per-writing-system basis -- the issue would devolve to
determining what the rules are for "eligible" letters.) But the simple
default would just be to titlecase the initial letter of each "word"
segment of a string.

Note that conceived this way, for the Georgian mappings, where the
titlecase mapping for Mkhedruli is simply the letter itself, this
approach ends up with:

capitalize(mkhedrulistring) --> mkhedrulistring

capitalize(MTAVRULISTRING) ==> titlecase(lowercase(MTAVRULISTRING)) -->
mkhedrulistring

Thus avoiding any mixed case.

--Ken
Received on Tue Oct 02 2018 - 16:43:47 CDT