.title() - annoying mistake

[Paul Bryan]

The topic of titles is complex, and would be significant undertaking to
automate. It's not only highly language-dependent, it's also based on
the subject work itself, and subject to guidelines of those charged
with indexing such works.

MusicBrainz guidelines:
https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Style/Titles
https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Style#Language_specific_guidelines

Wikipedia guidelines:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(capitalization)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Titles#Capital_letters

Addressing such complexities isn't going to be baked into the
simplistic `str.title` method. As demonstrated by the OP, it will
almost certainly come up short, even in the simplest use case. I
suggest the best approach then is to find (or write) a module that
addresses the specific use case, not try to address such shortcomings
in `str`.

Paul

On Sun, 2021-03-21 at 23:01 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 10:31 PM Robert Latest via Python-list
> <python-list at python.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Chris Angelico wrote:
> > > On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 4:31 AM Robert Latest via Python-list
> > > <python-list at python.org> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > Mats Wichmann wrote:
> > > > > The problem is that there isn't a standard for title case,
> > > > 
> > > > The problem is that we owe the very existence of the .title()
> > > > method to too
> > > > much weed being smoked during Python development. It makes
> > > > specific
> > > > assumptions about a specific use case of one specific language.
> > > > It doesn't
> > > > get more idiotic, frankly.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > The problem is that you haven't read the documentation :) It very
> > > carefully
> > > does NOT define itself by language, and its behaviour is
> > > identical regardless
> > > of the language used.
> > 
> > The documentation says: "The algorithm uses a simple language-
> > independent
> > definition of a word as groups of consecutive letters..."
> > 
> > Yes, I get that. But the purpose it (improperly) serves only makes
> > sense in the
> > English language.
> 
> Why? Do titles not exist in other languages? Does no other language
> capitalize words in book or other titles?
> 
> ChrisA