[Python-Dev] Maintenance burden of str.swapcase (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Wed Sep 7 05:00:16 CEST 2011

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 11:53 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

Nick Coghlan writes:  > The case-related methods, though, have no place in sane wire  > protocol handling.

RFC 822 headers are a somewhat insane but venerable (isn't that true of anything that's reached age 350 in dog-years?), and venerated, counterexample.  Specifically, field names are case-insensitive (RFC 5322, section 1.2.2).  I'll bet you can find plenty of others if you look.  You can call that "text" and say it should be processed in Unicode, if you like, but you're not even going to convince me (and as I say, I like the Kool-Aid).  Specifically, SMTP processes can (and even MUST, under some circumstances IIRC) manipulate the RFC 822 header. Sorry, Nick, no can do. -1

Heh, I knew as soon as I sent that message that someone would be able to point out a counter example. I agree that RFC 822 (and case-insensitive ASCII comparison in general) is enough to save lower() and upper() and co, but what about this even further reduced list of text-specific methods:

'capitalize' 'istitle' 'swapcase' 'title'

While case-insensitive comparison makes sense for wire level data, where do these methods fit in, even when embedded ASCII text fragments are involved?

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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