Ruby 1.9: how can I properly upcase & downcase multibyte strings?

Question

So matz made the decision to keep upcase and downcase limited to /[A-Z]/i in ruby 1.9.1.

ActiveSupport::Multibyte

Answer 1

Case conversion is complicated and locale-dependent. Fortunately, Martin Dürst added full Unicode case mapping in Ruby 2.4:

puts RUBY_DESCRIPTION

sd, su = "Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn", "IÑTËRNÂTIÔNÀLIZÆTIØN"
def ps(u, d, k); puts "%-30s:  %24s / %-24s" % [k, u, d] end 
ps sd.upcase,              su.downcase,              "Ruby 2.4 (default)"
ps sd.upcase(:ascii),      su.downcase(:ascii),      "Ruby 2.4 (ascii)"
ps sd.upcase(:turkic),     su.downcase(:turkic),     "Ruby 2.4 (turkic)"
ps sd.upcase(:lithuanian), su.downcase(:lithuanian), "Ruby 2.4 (lithuanian)"
ps "-",                    su.downcase(:fold),       "Ruby 2.4 (fold)"

Output:

ruby 2.4.0dev (2016-06-24 trunk 55499) [x86_64-linux]
Ruby 2.4 (default)            :      IÑTËRNÂTIÔNÀLIZÆTIØN / iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn
Ruby 2.4 (ascii)              :      IñTëRNâTIôNàLIZæTIøN / iÑtËrnÂtiÔnÀlizÆtiØn
Ruby 2.4 (turkic)             :      IÑTËRNÂTİÔNÀLİZÆTİØN / ıñtërnâtıônàlızætıøn
Ruby 2.4 (lithuanian)         :      IÑTËRNÂTIÔNÀLIZÆTIØN / iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn
Ruby 2.4 (fold)               :                         - / iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn

Answer 2

Case conversion is locale dependent and doesn't always round-trip, which is why Ruby 1.9 doesn't cover it (see here and here)

The unicode-util gem should address your needs.

Answer 3

for anybody coming from Google by ruby upcase utf8:

> "your problem chars here çöğıü Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn".mb_chars.upcase.to_s
=> "YOUR PROBLEM CHARS HERE ÇÖĞIÜ IÑTËRNÂTIÔNÀLIZÆTIØN"

solution is to use mb_chars.

Documentation:

• https://www.rubydoc.info/gems/activesupport/String#mb_chars-instance_method
• https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Multibyte/Chars.html