Re: case-sensitivity in xml

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

> 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
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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