.title() - annoying mistake

[Richard Damon]

On 3/21/21 7:31 PM, MRAB wrote:
> On 2021-03-21 22:30, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 9:04 AM Grant Edwards
>> <grant.b.edwards at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 2021-03-21, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 2:16 AM Robert Latest via Python-list
>>> <python-list at python.org> wrote:
>>> >
>>> >> I wonder if .title() properly capitalizes titles in any language.
>>> It doesn't in
>>> >> English (nor does it purport to), so it begs the question why it
>>> is there in
>>> >> the first place. German and Spanish don't have any special
>>> capitalization rules
>>> >> for titles; I don't know about any other languages.
>>> >>
>>> >
>>> > It correctly title-cases a single character, as has been pointed out
>>> > already.
>>>
>>> Not according to the docs. The doc states that .title() converts the
>>> first character characger in each "word" to _upper_ case. Is the doc
>>> wrong?
>>>
>>> If you want titlecase, then you should call str.capitalize() which
>>> (again according to the doc) converts the first character to _title_
>>> case (starting in v3.8).
>>>
>>
>> Hmm, maybe it's different in 3.10, but the docs I'm seeing look fine.
>> But maybe there's a better way to word it for both of them.
>>
> Python 3.9.2 (tags/v3.9.2:1a79785, Feb 19 2021, 13:44:55) [MSC v.1928
> 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>> help(str.title)
> Help on method_descriptor:
>
> title(self, /)
>     Return a version of the string where each word is titlecased.
>
>     More specifically, words start with uppercased characters and all
> remaining
>     cased characters have lower case.
>
> '\N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER DZ}', '\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER DZ}' and
> '\N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH SMALL LETTER Z}' are all digraphs, so
> is it correct to say that .title() uppercases the first character?
> Kind of.

I think the clarification calling them upper cased characters is close
enough considering that there are only 31 title cased characters, all
digraphs.

-- 
Richard Damon