.title() - annoying mistake

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 12:26 PM Richard Damon <Richard at damon-family.org> wrote:
>
> 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.
>

But it's wrong, and it would lead people to the exact error of
thinking that it's the same as upper() on str[0] and lower() on the
rest.

ChrisA