Re: [xsl] case-sensitivity in xml

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 06:59 PM 1/21/2005, it was written:
> Wendell Piez writes:
> > In general, case-folding is done with the translate function. So if
> >
> > <xsl:variable name="UPPER" select="'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'"/>
> >
> > <xsl:variable name="lower" select="'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'"/>
> >
> > then translate($string,$UPPER,$lower) will convert to lower case (at
least
> > in the English/Latin alphabet).
>
> English (ASCII/American) and Latin (ISO 8859-1/Western European) are not
> the same.

These encodings are not the same, but I submit the alphabets are close
enough to be reasonably considered the same ... of course it depends on
your notion of "alphabet". :-> (Some might even take exception to the
identification of the English alphabet with an American encoding standard!)

>   But it's easy to include Western, Eastern, and Southern
> European alphabets in your case conversion (see
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0100.pdf
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0180.pdf):
>
> <xsl:variable name="UPPER" select="...&#x00C0;&#x00C1;&#x00C2;..."/>
> <xsl:variable name="lower" select="...&#x00E0;&#x00E1;&#x00E2;..."/>
>
> Not to mention Greek and Cyrillic:
>
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0500.pdf

Well, it's easy providing you can determine a one-to-one mapping between
lower-case and upper-case characters in every case.

Some alphabets present difficulties: for example what is the upper-case
version of the German "sharp s"? (Find discussion of these issues in the
archives to this list.) If the character "_" has to be converted to "SS",
the simple translate() function won't do.

Since the sharp s has to be unusual in tag names, however, I considered
such minutiae probably outside the scope of the OP's question.

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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