Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!cognos!jimp
From: jimp@cognos.UUCP (Jim Patterson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Is there a good example of how toupper() works?
Keywords: converting upper/lower case macros
Message-ID: <9018@cognos.UUCP>
Date: 8 Nov 90 19:39:25 GMT
References: <1990Oct17.170914.683@wpi.WPI.EDU> <11021@hubcap.clemson.edu> <152580@felix.UUCP> <1990Nov7.043705.15051@robot.in-berlin.de>
Reply-To: jimp@cognos.UUCP (Jim Patterson)
Organization: Cognos Inc., Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 27

In article <1990Nov7.043705.15051@robot.in-berlin.de> karl@robot.in-berlin.de (Karl-P. Huestegge) writes:
>asylvain@felix.UUCP (Alvin "the Chipmunk" Sylvain) writes:
>
>>Conclusion: If there is a standard routine that does what you want, *use it*.
>>This increases reliability and portability and reduces debug time.
>
>There is another reason to use the standard library functions:
>The international Charactersets (8bit, ISO-8859-1 for example). On my
>international development system toupper('a-umlaut') is ('A-umlaut'),
>which is of course *not* 'a-umlaut'-32 or ('a-umlaut' - 'a'-'A').
>The functions accesses a library of the local language-set (depending
>on the environment-var LC_CTYPE)

You're fortunate to be working on a system that's "working" in this
regard.  We at one point abandoned the vendor's ctype.h functions
because they simply ignored 8-bit character sets. It wouldn't have
been so bad if they just considered the extended characters as
graphics or something, but in fact the functions were implemented with
128-byte tables so anything with the 8th bit set returned arbitrary
results. I won't mention the vendor since they have since put in very
good internationalization support, but I suspect this sort of problem
is present in a number of older implementations.
-- 
Jim Patterson                              Cognos Incorporated
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